TRAITS-GAMES - Traits and Games: How Personal Cognitive and Psychological Features Affect Strategic Behavior

Understanding how individual traits affect behavior and decision-making in strategic settings is a complex challenge. Traits like cognitive abilities, psychological features, and attitudes toward uncertainty can significantly influence outcomes. Traditional models often fail to separate these traits from the rules of interaction, leading to oversimplified analyses. This gap hampers our ability to predict and explain behavior in diverse and realistic scenarios, and to design good institutions and experiments. The ERC-funded TRAITS-GAMES project addresses this by developing a formal framework that distinguishes the rules of interaction from players’ traits. This separation enables a rigorous analysis of traits in games, considering factors like cognitive abilities and emotions. By avoiding assumptions of common knowledge of cognitive rationality (typical of extant epistemic game theory), the project provides insights into long-term outcomes of strategic interaction and institutional robustness. 

Events:

• Personal Traits and Strategic Interaction