Focal Points Revisited: Team Reasoning, the Principle of Insufficient Reason and Cognitive Hierarchy Theory

Nicholas Bardsley and Aljaz Ule

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Coordination on focal points in one shot games can often be explained by team reasoning, a departure from individualistic choice theory. However, a less exotic explanation of coordination is also available based on best-responding to uniform randomisation. We test the team reasoning explanation experimentally against this alternative, using coordination games with variable losses in the off-diagonal cells. Subjects’ responses are observed when the behaviour of their partner is determined in accordance with each theory, and under game conditions where behaviour is unconstrained. The results are more consistent with the team reasoning explanation. Increasing the difficulty of the coordination tasks produces some behaviour suggestive of response to randomisation, but this effect is not pronounced.

Keywords: coordination; team reasoning; cognitive hierarchy theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D01 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo, nep-exp and nep-neu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/58256/1/MPRA_paper_58256.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Focal points revisited: Team reasoning, the principle of insufficient reason and cognitive hierarchy theory (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:58256

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().