Resistance is Futile: Winning Lemonade Market Share through Metacognitive Reasoning in a Three-Agent Cooperative Game

The Lemonade Game is a three-player game in which players have to pick locations on a circular board, which are as far away as possible from those chosen independently by other players. Players may observe other player’s moves and infer their strategies. The game was studied using a competition of cognitively motivated agents, which inherit properties of adaptivity and stochasticity from human memory and decision-making, and simplistic, yet effective agents implementing fixed strategies. We argue that metacognition is the unique attribute that allows sophisticated agents to adapt to unforeseen conditions, cooperators and competitors.