The least effective treatment used money to motivate behavior directly. The most effective treatment uses a binary-lottery to induce preferences, but even this treatment requires giving subjects plenty of experience. Doing so reduced the play of the strictly dominated strategy to around 10 percent by the end of a session. There is no evidence for the explosive cycling needed to make the strictly dominated strategy an above average reply. The most surprising result was observing cycles in the frequency with which the strictly dominated action was played or spite cycles.
Spite cycles appear using both evolutionary and fixed pairs protocols.
1998 by the authors. All rights reserved. Introduction A strictly dominated strategy does worse than the strategy that dominates it in all possible outcomes. It is never in the set of best replies to any feasible belief. Since it can never be a best reply, rational choice requires that a player avoid the use of strictly dominated strategies.