 Group behaviour in tacit coordination games with focal points – an experimental investigationStefania Sitzia and Jiwei Zheng Games and Economic Behavior, 2019, vol. 117, issue C, 461-478 Abstract: This paper reports an experimental investigation of Schelling's theory of focal points that compares group and individual behaviour. We find that, when players' interests are perfectly aligned, groups more often choose the salient option and achieve higher coordination success than individuals. However, in games with conflicts of interest, groups do not always perform better than individuals, especially when the degree of conflict is substantial. We also find that groups outperform individuals when identifying the solution to the coordination problem requires some level of cognitive sophistication. Finally, players that successfully identify the solution to this game also achieve greater coordination rates than other players in games with a low degree of conflict. This result raises the question of whether finding the focal point is more a matter of logic rather than imagination as Schelling argued. Keywords: Groups; Coordination; Payoff-irrelevant cues; Cognition (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:117:y:2019:i:c:p:461-478 DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2019.08.001 Access Statistics for this article Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai More articles in Games and Economic Behavior from Elsevier |
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