Timing and Virtual Observability in Ultimatum Bargaining and “Weak Link” Coordination Games

Roberto Weber, Colin Camerer () and Marc Knez

Experimental Economics, 2004, vol. 7, issue 1, 25-48

Abstract: Previous studies have shown that simply knowing one player moves first can affect behavior in games, even when the first-mover's moves are known to be unobservable. This observation violates the game-theoretic principle that timing of unobserved moves is irrelevant, but is consistent with virtual observability, a theory of how timing can matter without the ability to observe actions. However, this previous research only shows that timing matters in games where knowledge that one player moved first can help select that player's preferred equilibrium, presenting an alternative explanation to virtual observability. We extend this work by varying timing of unobservable moves in ultimatum bargaining games and “weak link” coordination games. In the latter, the equilibrium selection explanation does not predict any change in behavior due to timing differences. We find that timing without observability affects behavior in both games, but not substantially. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2004

Keywords: timing; coordination games; experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (46)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1023/A:1026257921046 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Timing and Virtual Observability in Ultimatum Bargaining and Weak Link Coordination Games (1996)
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:kap:expeco:v:7:y:2004:i:1:p:25-48

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ry/journal/10683/PS2

DOI: 10.1023/A:1026257921046

Access Statistics for this article

Experimental Economics is currently edited by David J. Cooper, Lata Gangadharan and Charles N. Noussair

More articles in Experimental Economics from Springer, Economic Science Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().