Coordination in Time

Lars Boerner, Erik Kimbrough and Mouli Modak
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Lars Boerner: Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, IWH Leibniz Institute & DAFM King’s College London

Working Papers from Chapman University, Economic Science Institute

Abstract: We study how well people are able to solve pure coordination problems in continuous time. Subjects decide whether and when to pay a cost to go to market with their goods and earn money only if another person shows up at the same time. We show that coordination failure is common in a baseline, and we introduce treatments that feature public coordination devices (meant to mimic clocks) and assess the extent to which coordination improves when such devices are provided via different institutions. A publicly provided device outperforms a variety of privately provided alternatives. Our evidence suggests this is because reliable public provision eliminates uncertainty about whether (and how many) other people expect to observe the coordinating signal.

Keywords: coordination games; experiments; timing games (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C7 C9 D01 D9 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-mic
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:chu:wpaper:25-09

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