TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Gill, David
AU  - Prowse, Victoria L.
        TI  - Using Response Times to Measure Strategic Complexity and the Value of Thinking in Games
        PY  - 2017/Jan/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 10518
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp10518
        AB  - Response times are a simple low-cost indicator of the process of reasoning in strategic games (Rubinstein, 2007; Rubinstein, 2016). We leverage the dynamic nature of response-time data from repeated strategic interactions to measure the strategic complexity of a situation by how long people think on average when they face that situation (where we define situations according to the characteristics of play in the previous round). We find that strategic complexity varies significantly across situations, and we find considerable heterogeneity in how responsive subjects' thinking times are to complexity.
We also study how variation in response times at the individual level across rounds affects strategic behavior and success. We find that 'overthinking' is detrimental to performance: when a subject thinks for longer than she would normally do in a particular situation, she wins less frequently and earns less. The behavioral mechanism that drives the reduction in performance is a tendency to move away from Nash equilibrium behavior.
        KW  - response time
KW  - decision time
KW  - thinking time
KW  - strategic complexity
KW  - game theory
KW  - strategic games
KW  - repeated games
KW  - beauty contest
KW  - cognitive ability
KW  - personality
        ER  -