Strategic pattern recognition—experimental evidence

The repeated play of an asymmetric Battle of the Sexes is analyzed from the perspective of “strategic pattern recognition.” Convergence to equilibrium patterns (in finite histories) and related concepts like breaking-an-equilibrium-pattern are defined and applied to the data. More than half of 202 pairs of subjects are characterized as weakly converging to a fixed equilibrium pattern. The results also show that subjects tend to break their best pattern in cases where their partners' payoffs are relatively low and that convergence initiation does not pay off. While female subjects frequently reject the males' best equilibrium with anonymous matching, behavior gets more cooperative when pairs are introduced to each other before the beginning of the game.