Multi-dimensional reasoning in competitive resource allocation games: Evidence from intra-team communication

Abstract

We experimentally investigate behavior and reasoning in various competitive resource allocation games with large strategy spaces. In the experiment, a team of two players plays as one entity against other teams. Team members communicate with one another before choosing a strategy. We analyze their messages using three different classification approaches and find that the vast majority of players think in terms of dimensions or characteristics of strategies rather than in terms of individual elements of the strategy space. Furthermore, the dimensions’ metric allows linking the reasoning across the different games. Thus, we suggest that multi-dimensional reasoning is a frequently used decision procedure that connects the behavior observed in various resource allocation games.