Eliciting Strategies in Indefinitely Repeated Games of Strategic Substitutes and Complements

Abstract

We introduce a novel method to elicit strategies in indefinitely repeated games and apply it to games of strategic substitutes and complements. We find that out of 256 possible unit recall machines (and 1024 full strategies) participants could use, only five machines are used more than 5 percent of the time. Those are "static Nash", "myopic best response", "Tit-for-Tat" and two "Nash reversion" strategies. We compare outcome data with "hot" treatments and find that the fact that we elicit strategies did not affect the path of play. We also discuss applications to IO literature and compare insights to previous literature on strategy elicitation mostly focused on the prisoner's dilemma.

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