Co-action equilibrium fails to predict choices in mixed-strategy settings

Abstract

Social projection is the tendency to project one's own characteristics onto others. This phenomenon can potentially explain cooperation in prisoner's dilemma experiments and other social dilemmas. The social projection hypothesis has recently been formalized for symmetric games as co-action equilibrium and for general games as consistent evidential equilibrium. These concepts have been proposed to predict choice behavior in experimental one-shot games. We test the predictions of the co-action equilibrium concept in a simple binary minimizer game experiment. We find no evidence of social projection.