arXiv subjects

Meng-Jhang Fong

Publications and source records attributed to Meng-Jhang Fong.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Revisiting the Intra-Team Communication Method to Elicit Level-k Reasoning in Beauty Contests and 11-20 Games

How level-0 players behave and how they are perceived by higher-level players are central questions in the literature on level-k models of boundedly rational strategic reasoning. To study these twin questions, we apply the intra-team communication method developed by Burchardi and Penczynski (2014) to identify level-0 actions and beliefs in the canonical beauty contest game and in a variant of the 11-20 game of Goeree et al. (2018), in which behavior appears inconsistent with the standard level-k model. In the beauty contest game, we replicate Burchardi and Penczynski (2014)'s finding that elicited level-0 beliefs align with observed level-0 actions. In the variant of the 11-20 game, however, elicited level-0 beliefs and observed level-0 actions diverge, and both depart from the standard level-0 assumption, suggesting a complementary explanation for the behavioral pattern documented by Goeree et al. (2018).

econ.GN↗

arXiv2026

A Comparison of Cursed Sequential Equilibrium and Sequential Cursed Equilibrium: Different Concepts of Cursedness in Dynamic Games

Cursed Equilibrium of Eyster and Rabin (2005) has been a leading theory for explaining winner's-curse-type behavior in static Bayesian games, but it faces conceptual limitations when applied to dynamic games. Two recent extensions, Cursed Sequential Equilibrium (CSE) by Fong, Lin and Palfrey (2025) and Sequential Cursed Equilibrium (SCE) by Cohen and Li (2026), address these limitations in fundamentally different ways. Complementing these two papers, this paper provides a systematic comparison of CSE and SCE, clarifying their conceptual foundations and technical implications, including their notions of cursedness, belief updating, and treatment of public histories.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2024

Measuring Higher-Order Rationality with Belief Control

Determining an individual's strategic reasoning capability based solely on choice data is a complex task. This complexity arises because sophisticated players might have non-equilibrium beliefs about others, leading to non-equilibrium actions. In our study, we pair human participants with computer players known to be fully rational. This use of robot players allows us to disentangle limited reasoning capacity from belief formation and social biases. Our results show that, when paired with robots, subjects consistently demonstrate higher levels of rationality and maintain stable rationality levels across different games compared to when paired with humans. This suggests that strategic reasoning might indeed be a consistent trait in individuals. Furthermore, the identified rationality limits could serve as a measure for evaluating an individual's strategic capacity when their beliefs about others are adequately controlled.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2023

Cursed Sequential Equilibrium

This paper develops a framework to extend the strategic form analysis of cursed equilibrium (CE) developed by Eyster and Rabin (2005) to multi-stage games. The approach uses behavioral strategies rather than normal form mixed strategies, and imposes sequential rationality. We define cursed sequential equilibrium (CSE) and compare it to sequential equilibrium and standard normal-form CE. We provide a general characterization of CSE and establish its properties. We apply CSE to five applications in economics and political science. These applications illustrate a wide range of differences between CSE and Bayesian Nash equilibrium or CE: in signaling games; games with preplay communication; reputation building; sequential voting; and the dirty faces game where higher order beliefs play a key role. A common theme in several of these applications is showing how and why CSE implies systematically different behavior than Bayesian Nash equilibrium in dynamic games of incomplete information with private values, while CE coincides with Bayesian Nash equilibrium for such games.

econ.TH↗