Cycle frequency in standard Rock-Paper-Scissors games: Evidence from experimental economics

Abstract

The Rock-Paper-Scissors (RPS) game is a widely used model system in game theory. Evolutionary game theory predicts the existence of persistent cycles in the evolutionary trajectories of the RPS game, but experimental evidence has remained to be rather weak. In this work we performed laboratory experiments on the RPS game and analyzed the social-state evolutionary trajectories of twelve populations of N=6 players. We found strong evidence supporting the existence of persistent cycles. The mean cycling frequency was measured to be $0.029\pm 0.009$ period per experimental round. Our experimental observations can be quantitatively explained by a simple non-equilibrium model, namely the discrete-time logit dynamical process with a noise parameter. Our work therefore favors the evolutionary game theory over the classical game theory for describing the dynamical behavior of the RPS game.

7 Page, 3 figure; Keyword: Rock-Paper-Scissors game; cycle; social state; population dynamics; evolutionary trajectory

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Cited by in corpus (10)

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• Synchronization and extinction in cyclic games with mixed strategies
• Periodic frequencies of the cycles in $2\times 2$ games: evidence from experimental economics
• Incentive and stability in the Rock-Paper-Scissors game: an experimental investigation
• Cycling in stochastic general equilibrium
• Testability of evolutionary game dynamics models based on experimental economics data
• A Comment on "Cycles and Instability in a Rock-Paper-Scissors Population Game: A Continuous Time Experiment"
• Extortion outperforms generosity in iterated Prisoners' Dilemma