Strategic thinking is at the intellectual core of the calculus for the 21st century, which is not the mathematical calculus that emerged in the 17th century, but rather the logical calculus that was conceived in the same period by Leibniz, one of the two inventors of the mathematical calculus. Leibniz put great emphasis on a universal language to organize concepts, on rules to guide thinking an...

Abstract We leverage response-time data from repeated strategic interactions to measure the complexity of a situation by how long people think on average when they face that (where we categorize situations according characteristics play in previous round). find varies significantly across situations, and considerable heterogeneity responsive subjects’ thinking times are complexity. also study v...

This paper compares the leading models of strategic thinking with subjects’ initial responses to Van Huyck et al.’s (1990, 1991; “VHBB”) coordination games. The data favor models in which players treat their partners’ decisions as correlated rather than independent. Among the equilibrium selection criteria we compare, payoff-dominant equilibrium fits better than risk-dominant equilibrium or a s...

Game theory is a mathematical language for describing strategic interactions, in which each player's choice affects the payoff of other players (where players can be genes, people, companies, nation-states, etc.). The impact of game theory in psychology has been limited by the lack of cognitive mechanisms underlying game-theoretic predictions. 'Behavioural game theory' is a recent approach link...