Coordination problems and the role of institutions: multi-agent simulations with learning
Alessandro Arrighetti and
Salvatore Curatolo ()
No 2009-EP06, Economics Department Working Papers from Department of Economics, Parma University (Italy)
Abstract:
The paper develops an agent-based coordination game in which agents seek, try out and maintain coordination in the presence of positive search and coordination costs. Agents are perfectly rational in the sense that they optimise their individual payoff through coordination. They are moreover perfectly loyal, since they do not abandon coordination unless it becomes collectively impossible to maintain it and they share equally both the net advantage of coordination and the net loss of failure. Our findings appear to confirm that in context of ontological uncertainty, learning and coordination costs, cooperation often fails in terms of process and final outcome. The absence of opportunism thus do not ensure that agents will cooperate extensively. Moreover learning on one hand optimises search costs and makes the artificial world of the experiment more realistic. On the other hand, it leads agents to more prudent and conservative behaviour. Agents’ loyalty makes superfluous regulatory institutions preventing individual opportunism, but it gives them significant scope for intervention in context of coordination failure. As players involved in the game, rather than arbitrators or regulators, catalyst institutions accelerate coordination and induce cooperation equilibria higher than those single agents autonomously are able to reach.
Pages: 34
Date: 2009
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cmp and nep-exp
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://swrwebeco.econ.unipr.it/RePEc/pdf/I_2009-06.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Status read failed: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host.
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:par:dipeco:2009-ep06
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Economics Department Working Papers from Department of Economics, Parma University (Italy) Via J.F. Kennedy 6, 43100 PARMA (Italy). Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Andrea Lasagni ().