Discussion Paper
On the Empirical Content of Quantal Response Equilibrium
The quantal response equilibrium (QRE) notion of McKelvey and Palfrey (1995) has recently attracted considerable attention, due largely to its widely documented ability to rationalize observed behavior in games played by experimental subjects. We show that this ability to fit the data, as typically measured in this literature, is uninformative. Without a priori distributional assumptions, a QRE can match any distribution of behavior by each player in any normal form game.