We examine strategic sophistication using eight two-person 3 × 3 one-shot games. To facilitate strategic thinking, we design a ‘structured’ environment where subjects first assign subjective values to the payoff pairs and state their beliefs about their counterparts’ probable strategies, before selecting their own strategies in light of those deliberations. Our results show that a majority of strategy choices are inconsistent with the equilibrium prediction, and that only just over half of strategy choices constitute best responses to subjects’ stated beliefs. Allowing for other-regarding considerations increases best responding significantly, but the increase is rather small. We further compare patterns of strategies with those made in an ‘unstructured’ environment in which subjects are not specifically directed to think strategically. Our data suggest that structuring the pre-decision deliberation process does not affect strategic sophistication.

我们使用 8 个两人 3 × 3 单次游戏来检验策略的复杂性。为了促进战略思考，我们设计了一个“结构化”环境，在该环境中，受试者首先将主观价值分配给收益对，并陈述他们对对方可能策略的看法，然后根据这些商议选择自己的策略。我们的结果表明，大多数策略选择与均衡预测不一致，只有略多于一半的策略选择构成了对受试者陈述信念的最佳反应。考虑到其他方面的考虑会显着增加最佳响应，但增加的幅度很小。我们进一步将策略模式与在“非结构化”环境中制定的策略模式进行比较，在这种环境中，受试者没有专门针对战略思考。