Overview

In this seminar, I present two complementary strands of experimental evidence on behavior in guessing games, designed to probe the limits of rationality under different cognitive and strategic constraints. In the first part, I examine one-player guessing games, framed as simple mathematical puzzles without strategic interaction. Analyzing four independent datasets, I show that the majority of players deviate systematically from the optimal solution. I argue that these patterns are not random errors but structured consequences of bounded rationality: players rely on simple, computationally economical heuristics that can be formally captured by a theoretical model of the task. The second part turns to repeated beauty contest games with continuous payoffs and changing multipliers. Unlike the well-known rapid convergence to equilibrium in standard designs, here convergence vanishes once small structural modifications alter the attractors of the decision space. Instead of approaching optimal play, participants adapt through local adjustments to observed outcomes, generating persistent non-equilibrium dynamics. Together, these findings highlight a common thread: behavior in guessing games is shaped less by the pursuit of equilibrium solutions and more by cognitive constraints and ecological features of the environment.