[eastbay]

If you want an "empirical" study then, right, you have to collect the data, and online games is the only viable option. I am doubtful that you could get cooperation from the sites.

I think the best way to do it is with an observed game data mining program. This is a significant undertaking, but has obvious multiple utilities which may justify the "cost" of developing such a capability.

Collecting data from individual players has clear sample bias problems if you are looking for effects which occur in the mean of the pool of all players.

An alternative is with a game model and simulation. I have done this with some quite simple "push/fold" strategies. The results are remarkably linear, but the strategies may not include "real world" elements that generate the deviations from linearity. I have some pretty well-defined ideas about how to improve such simulations to search for the S-curve phenomenon. But any such study is not really "empirical" and there will always be doubts about the sufficiency of the strategy algorithms to capture all of the things that real players do which might generate the deviations from linearity.

Just a quick brain dump.

eastbay