Training strategic thinking: Experimental evidence
Abstract Strategic behavior is crucial for strong firm performance, especially in competitive environments. Thus, designing a good strategy is a key issue for firms. Designing a strategy requires a combination of strategic thinking—which involves analyzing a firm's strategic environment, defining a vision of its future, and devising new ideas to out-think competitors – and strategic planning – which implies using these ideas to formulate a business plan. Although many firms excel at strategic planning, few devote enough resources to strategic thinking, which results in strategic insanity (i.e., firms repeatedly applying the same strategies with the expectation of different outcomes). To fos…
Do individuals with higher cognitive ability play more strategically?
Abstract This paper experimentally analyses the relationship between cognitive ability and strategic behaviour. In our experiment, individuals play in a sequential game, where computing the equilibrium is challenging. On completion of the game, we measure each player’s cognitive ability using Raven’s Progressive Matrices test. Our results reveal that the number of strategic decisions (played in the sequential game) increases significantly among those individuals with higher cognitive ability (measured by Raven’s test), compared to those with lower cognitive ability. These results clearly confirm that individuals with higher cognitive abilities play more strategically.
Modeling Local Social Migrations: A Cellular Automata Approach
In local social migrations, agents move from their initial location looking for a better local social environment. Social migrations processes do not change the number of social agents of a given type (i.e., the empirical distribution of the population) but their spatial location. Although cellular automata seems to appear as a natural approach to model of social migrations, the evolution of the configuration through a cellular automata might induce a new configuration wherein the number of agents of each type might be actually modified. This article provides a characterization of these cellular automata rules such that for any initial empirical distribution, the evolution of the configurat…