The lottery player’s fallacy: Why labels predict strategic choices

Abstract

This paper examines games with non-neutral option labels (such as "A", "B", "A", "A") and nds surprisingly invariant behaviour across games. The behaviour closely resembles the choices people make when they have to bet on one of the options in individual lotteries. An option's 'representativeness' (lack of distinguishing features) and 'reachability' (physical centrality, salience, and valence) determine choice behaviour in both the lotteries and the highly strategic games. There is no evidence of people best-responding to others' betting(-like) behaviour. This is in line with the idea that once people decide that strategic reasoning would not take them any further, they pick an alternative as if they were betting on one of their 'current best-responses'. The ndings explain the well-documented seeker advantage in hide-and-seek games, as well as why participants often display behaviour that could be exploited by others. On top, they help understand why in national lotteries, people also tend to bet on identical subsets of the available numbers.

Biases in belief reports

“…In Experiment 2-tyl, we use the same sets of labelled boxes. However, participants play one-shot ''to-your-left games'' (Wolff, 2021), in which a player gets a prize of 12e if he chooses the box immediately to the left of his opponent's choice. The game works in a circular fashion, so that choosing ''4'' against a choice of ''1'' by your opponent would make you win the 12e in a ''1-2-3-4'' setting.…”

Position biases in sequential location selection: Effects of region, choice history, and visibility of previous selections

“…sometimes also by their other features [13]. For instance, the probability that a certain number on a lottery ticket is selected also depends on its representativeness [15,36].…”

“…All tasks considered so far require choosing one of several items in an array. As a consequence, it is possible that additional biases from the features of the items or array contaminate pure position biases [13]. If the items are numbers, for instance, as in lottery or roulette choices, those considered as most representative [14] are often preferred [15].…”