Strategy Adjustments in Games with a Dynamic Public Bad: Experimental Evidence Available to Purchase

This paper was written specifically for the call for submissions for the special issue honoring Richard (Dick) Day after one of the co-authors, Svetlana Pevnitskaya, was invited to submit a paper. Svetlana Pevnitskaya was a student of Dick and had the opportunity to directly witness his intellectually inquisitive and curious mind and his openness to explore a broad range of research approaches and methods. Dick was not afraid to consider unorthodox approaches if he believed them to be promising. Dick Day is well known for studying economic dynamics, where he was motivated by and contributed to a series of important practical policy questions. In his quest for better methods and the accuracy of results he became interested very early on in human decision making and its deviations from classical theory, as well as the effect such deviations would have on macroeconomic models. These areas of research remain very active today. To honor Dick, Svetlana decided to make a contribution for this special issue from the line of research with experimental analysis of dynamic games, extending prior research with Dmitry Ryvkin on games with a dynamic public bad. Furthermore, to pay respects to Dick’s innovative approach, this paper introduces a novel idea of investigating whether individual strategy in this game is itself dynamic and evolves with time and experience.