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Do people make strategic commitments? Experimental evidence on strategic information avoidance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Anders U. Poulsen  and
Michael W.M. Roos
Anders U. Poulsen*
Affiliation:
School of Economics, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK
Michael W.M. Roos
Affiliation:
Fakultät für Wirtschaftswissenschaft, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 44780 Bochum, Germany
*
e-mail: a.poulsen@uea.ac.uk
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Abstract

Game theory predicts that players make strategic commitments that may appear counter-intuitive. We conducted an experiment to see if people make a counter-intuitive but strategically optimal decision to avoid information. The experiment is based on a sequential Nash demand game in which a responding player can commit ahead of the game not to see what a proposing player demanded. Our data show that subjects do, but only after substantial time, learn to make the optimal strategic commitment. We find only weak evidence of physical timing effects.

Keywords

Strategic commitmentCommitmentBargainingStrategic value of informationPhysical timing effectsEndogenous timingExperiment

JEL classification

D63: Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement C78: Bargaining Theory • Matching Theory C90: General C92: Laboratory, Group Behavior D80: General C72: Noncooperative Games
Type
Research Article
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , June 2010 , pp. 206 - 225
Copyright
Copyright © Economic Science Association 2010

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Footnotes

Poulsen is member of the Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Science at the University of East Anglia, and affiliate researcher at the Centre for Experimental Economics at University of Copenhagen.

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi: 10.1007/s10683-010-9236-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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