Strategy Preference Distribution in the Weakest-Link Game: An Analysis Based on Lab Experiments

As many researchers mentioned, in addition to players’ different strategy preferences, the expectation towards other players’ behavior will jointly affect the coordination level in the weakest-link game. Then how to analyze those factors? To some extent, those factors can be depicted by players’ choices in the first round. With the data from several lab experiments, the strategy preferences distribution is discussed in this paper. It is concluded that the overall distribution of the players’ initial choices is left skewed, indicating that the players have the motivation to pursue more payoff and the altruistic preference in observed in the beginning of the game. Also, this distribution has no significant difference among all the lab experiments with different treatments, which shows that different coordination levels in the end of different experiment are not due to the initial choice distribution difference. At the same time, no significant distribution difference is found different gender, major in high school and college of players. But then we take a look at the rank of the seven choices, there is significant difference, which shows that different treatment might induce a little difference of the expectation towards other players’ behavior, although the overall distribution might be the same.