Neural Networks for Predicting Human Interactions in Repeated Games
This addresses the problem of modeling human behavior in strategic games for researchers and practitioners, but it is incremental as it applies existing neural network methods to this domain.
The paper tackled predicting human players' actions in repeated strategic interactions using neural networks, showing that they outperform established behavioral economics models in prediction accuracy, cross-entropy, and economic value on a dataset of normal-form games.
We consider the problem of predicting human players' actions in repeated strategic interactions. Our goal is to predict the dynamic step-by-step behavior of individual players in previously unseen games. We study the ability of neural networks to perform such predictions and the information that they require. We show on a dataset of normal-form games from experiments with human participants that standard neural networks are able to learn functions that provide more accurate predictions of the players' actions than established models from behavioral economics. The networks outperform the other models in terms of prediction accuracy and cross-entropy, and yield higher economic value. We show that if the available input is only of a short sequence of play, economic information about the game is important for predicting behavior of human agents. However, interestingly, we find that when the networks are trained with long enough sequences of history of play, action-based networks do well and additional economic details about the game do not improve their performance, indicating that the sequence of actions encode sufficient information for the success in the prediction task.