 Overcoming coordination failure in games with focal points: An experimental investigationDavid Rojo Arjona, Stefania Sitzia and Jiwei Zheng Games and Economic Behavior, 2022, vol. 136, issue C, 505-523 Abstract: We experimentally test whether increasing the salience of payoff-irrelevant focal points (Schelling, 1960) can counteract the negative impact of conflicts of interest on coordination. The intuition is that, in the presence of conflict, the solution to the coordination dilemma offered by the focal point loses importance. Increasing its salience increases its relevance and, therefore, coordination success. When we vary label salience between subjects, we find support for this conjecture in games with a constant degree of conflict, similar to battle of the sexes games, but not in games that feature outcomes with different degrees of payoff inequality and efficiency. In an additional experiment in which we vary label salience within subjects, choices are found not to be affected by our salience manipulation. Yet, the proportion of choices consistent with the focal point is significantly greater than that in the between-subject design. Keywords: Coordination games; Focal points; Salience; Conflict of interest; Battle-of-the-sexes (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:136:y:2022:i:c:p:505-523 DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2022.10.010 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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