Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/257534 
Year of Publication: 
2021
Citation: 
[Journal:] Games [ISSN:] 2073-4336 [Volume:] 12 [Issue:] 3 [Article No.:] 52 [Publisher:] MDPI [Place:] Basel [Year:] 2021 [Pages:] 1-15
Publisher: 
MDPI, Basel
Abstract: 
This research studied the strategies that players use in sequential adversarial games. We took the Rock-Paper-Scissors (RPS) game as an example and ran players in two experiments. The first experiment involved two humans, who played the RPS together for 100 times. Importantly, our payoff design in the RPS allowed us to differentiate between participants who used a random strategy from those who used a Nash strategy. We found that participants did not play in agreement with the Nash strategy, but rather, their behavior was closer to random. Moreover, the analyses of the participants' sequential actions indicated heterogeneous cycle-based behaviors: some participants' actions were independent of their past outcomes, some followed a well-known win-stay/lose-change strategy, and others exhibited the win-change/lose-stay behavior. To understand the sequential patterns of outcome-dependent actions, we designed probabilistic computer algorithms involving specific change actions (i.e., to downgrade or upgrade according to the immediate past outcome): the Win-Downgrade/Lose-Stay (WDLS) or Win-Stay/Lose-Upgrade (WSLU) strategies. Experiment 2 used these strategies against a human player. Our findings show that participants followed a win-stay strategy against the WDLS algorithm and a lose-change strategy against the WSLU algorithm, while they had difficulty in using an upgrade/downgrade direction, suggesting humans' limited ability to detect and counter the actions of the algorithm. Taken together, our two experiments showed a large diversity of sequential strategies, where the win-stay/lose-change strategy did not describe the majority of human players' dynamic behaviors in this adversarial situation.
Subjects: 
rock-paper-scissors
theory of mind
win-stay/lose-change
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Article
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