“ Sleep choice and time - of - day effects on p - beauty contest outcomes . ”

Sleep data are gathered prior to administration of the well-known p-beauty contest game. Additionally, using a validated morningness-eveningness preference measure, morning-type and evening-type subjects are identified and randomly matched or mismatched into morning or evening experiment sessions. This design allows examination of the effects of voluntary sleep restriction and optimal/suboptimal times-of-day on behavioral outcomes. Subject responses display significantly lower levels of iterative reasoning when ‘sleep deprived’ or at non-optimal times-of-day. However, repeated play shows that sleep loss and suboptimal times-of-day do not affect learning/adaptation in response to information feedback. Our results apply to environments where anticipation is important (e.g., coordination games, stock trading, driving, etc.), with important implications for sleep deprived individuals or those operating at suboptimal times-of-day (e.g., shift workers, new parents).