Does Experience Teach? Professionals and Minimax Play in the Lab
重新分析专业足球运动员在实验室混合策略游戏中的行为数据，发现其表现与最小最大假设不一致，而学生行为反而更符合该假设。
Does expertise in strategic behavior obtained in the …eld transfer to the abstract setting of the laboratory? Palacios-Huerta and Volij (2008) argue that the behavior of professional soccer players in mixedstrategy games conforms closely to minimax play while the behavior of students (who are presumably novices in strategic situations requiring unpredictability) does not. We reexamine their data, showing that, in fact, the play of professionals is inconsistent with the minimax hypothesis in several important respects: (i) professionals follow non-stationary mixtures, with card frequencies that are negatively correlated between the …rst and the second half of the experiment; (ii) professionals tend to switch between halves from underplaying a card relative to its equilibrium frequency to overplaying it (and vice-versa), and (iii) the distribution of card frequencies across professionals is far from the distribution implied by minimax. In each of these respects the behavior of students conforms more closely to the minimax hypothesis. I’ve bene…ted from many discussions over the years with Mark Walker about mixedstrategy play, and my thoughts on this topic have been in‡uenced by those discussions. I’m grateful to Diego Moreno, Matt Van Essen, and Mark Walker for helpful comments and to Matt for outstanding research assistance.