Coordination by Sunspots: Letter is Mightier than Colour

John Bone, Michalis Drouvelis, Konstantinos Georgalos and Indrajit Ray

No 444838694, Working Papers from Lancaster University Management School, Economics Department

Abstract: We set up an experiment to test whether players use a payoff-irrelevant public message (BLUE or RED) as a possible sunspot to coordinate in a Battle of the Sexes game in which the pure strategies are labelled as X and Y. We find that most players do not play a “sunspot equilibrium†; instead, they learn to coordinate on a particular focal point (pure strategy X) in the game, largely ignoring the presence of the public signal (colour), and stick to this focal point, even after the public signal is withdrawn. Colour-contingent play emerges in only two of the six matching groups, which adopt opposite mappings.

Keywords: Battle of the Sexes; Coordination; Sunspots; Public Signal; Focal Point (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-spo
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/media/lancaster-univers ... casterWP2026_004.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:lan:wpaper:444838694

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Lancaster University Management School, Economics Department Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Giorgio Motta ().