Competing Against Experienced and Inexperienced Players

In certain markets success may depend on how well participants anticipate the behavior of other participants who have varying amounts of experience. Understanding if and how peoples behavior depends on competitors level of experience is important since in most markets participants have varying amounts of experience. Examining data from two new experimental studies similar to the beauty contest game first studied by Nagel (1995), the results indicate that (1) players with no experience behave the same against competitors with and without experience but (2) players quickly learn to condition their behavior on competitors experience level, causing (3) behavior to stop moving toward the equilibrium whenever new players enter the game and (4) experienced players to earn more money than less experienced players. The paper discusses the implications of the results for understanding and modeling behavior in markets in which participants have different amounts of experience.This revised version was published online in May 2005 with corrections to the acknowledgements.