Cross-cultural differences in playing centipede-like games with surprising opponents

In this paper, we study cross-cultural differences in strategic reasoning in turn-taking games, as related to game-theoretic norms as well as affective aspects such as trust, degrees of risk-taking and cooperation. We performed a game experiment to investigate how these aspects play a role in reasoning in simple turn-based games, known as centipede-like games, across three cultures, that of The Netherlands, Israel and India. While there is no significant main effect of nationalities on the behaviour of players across games, certain unexpected interactive effects are found in their behaviour in particular games.