Separating the Hawks from the Doves: Evidence from continuous time laboratory games

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Human players in our laboratory experiment received flow payoffs over 120 seconds each period from a standard Hawk-Dove bimatrix game played in continuous time. Play converged closely to the symmetric mixed Nash equilibrium under a one-population matching protocol. When the same players were matched in a two-population protocol with the same bimatrix, they showed clear movement towards an asymmetric (and very inequitable) pure Nash equilibrium of the game. These findings support distinctive predictions of evolutionary game theory. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor mayJEL-Code: C73, C92, D74.

Equilibrium selection with coupled populations in hawk–dove games: Theory and experiment in continuous time

“…We also see a sound separation of hawks and doves in our pure two-population (κ = 1) treatment. These findings confirm and extend the experiments of Oprea et al (2011). Among the discrepancies between the replicator dynamics prediction and the experimental results is a general bias in the mixed strategies: in the treatments where the mixed equilibrium was expected, the frequency of hawk play was lower than predicted.…”

“…Introduced by Maynard Smith and Price (1973) in the context of animal conflict, it also became highly influential for human interactions due to its fairly simple definition which nevertheless generates very rich dynamics as a population game. Oprea et al (2011) analyze the hawk-dove game for the sign-preserving dynamics of the one-and the two-population case. Their (continuous-time) experiment confirms the predictions in that the symmetric mixed equilibrium is more likely to be selected in the one-population treatment whereas separation is stronger in the two-population treatment.…”

That's How We Roll: An Experiment on Rollover Risk

“…The first one corresponds to continuous-time experiments, the second to "timing experiments", with a special emphasis on the experimental bank-runs literature. Continuous time experiments started years ago, with Friedman and Cheung (2009) and Morgan and Brunnermeier (2010) (whose working papers appeared around 2003/04), but it has not been until recently that this experimental technique has taken off with Oprea et al (2009) and Anderson et al (2010) looking into strategic investment decisions, Oprea et al (2011) studying the evolutionary equilibrium of the hawk and dove game, Friedman and Oprea (2012) experimenting with the effects of response delay in a repeated prisoners dilemma game, and Rabanal (2012) looking at mortgage default timing. While none of these papers directly address any of the questions of our paper, they are a good reference for the methodological design of our experiment.…”

Behavioral Conflict and Fairness in Social Networks

“…The games we study are networked generalizations of repeated or continuous versions of the game of Chicken or Hawk-Dove [9], 2-player instances and certain generalizations of which have been studied extensively in the lab [15,17,3]. The subject of fairness in human interactions has a very long history as well.…”