MEASURING THE TYPICALNESS OF BEHAVIOR

The importance of a characteristic for the description of the typical behavior of a group of experimental subjects is expressed by its typic ity. The typicity of a subject indicates the extent to which its behav ior is typical. A method for the determination of typicities was propo sed in Selten et al. (Discussion paper B-106, University of Bonn, 1988 ). Their definition is based on an intuitive justification and cannot answer questions concerning the uniqueness and the mathematical proper ties of the typicities. The entirely different approach of a least squ ares approximation of the connection between the subjects and the char acteristics leads to the same typicities and allows the formulation of a sufficient condition for uniqueness.