Hypothetical Thinking and Information Extraction in the Laboratory
通过投票实验，研究人们在共同价值环境中（如拍卖或选举）是否从对手策略中推断信息，发现50%到80%的受试者因难以从假设事件中提取信息而犯错，且错误不受经验和提示影响。
In several common-value environments (e.g., auctions or elections), players should make informational inferences from opponents' strategies under certain hypothetical events (e.g., winning the auction or being pivotal). We design a voting experiment that identifies whether subjects make these inferences and distinguishes between hypothetical thinking and information extraction. Depending on feedback, between 50 and 80 percent of subjects behave nonoptimally. More importantly, these mistakes are driven by difficulty in extracting information from hypothetical, but not from actual, events. Mistakes are robust to experience and hints, and also arise in more general settings where players have no private information.