Inference in Games Without Equilibrium Restriction: An Application to Restaurant Competition in Opening Hours
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article relaxes the Bayesian Nash equilibrium assumption in the estimation of discrete choice games with incomplete information. Instead of assuming unbiased/correct expectations, the model specifies a player’s belief about the behaviors of other players as an unrestricted unknown function. I then study the joint identification of belief and payoff functions in a game where players have different numbers of actions (e.g., 3 × 2 game). This asymmetry in action sets partially identifies the payoff function of the player with more actions. Moreover, if usual exclusion restrictions are satisfied, the payoff and belief functions are point identified up to a scale, and the restriction of equilibrium beliefs is testable. Finally, under a multiplicative separability condition on payoffs, the above identification results are extended to the player with fewer actions and to games with symmetric action sets. I apply this model and its identification results to study the store hours competition between McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken in China. The null hypothesis of unbiased beliefs is rejected. If researchers incorrectly impose the equilibrium assumption, then the estimated interactive effect would be biased downward by more than 50%.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".