Failing to utilize potentially effective focal points: Prominence can stymie coordination on distinct actions

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Gneezy, Uri; Rottenstreich, Yuval
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California San Diego
• 刊物名称: GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0899-8256
• DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2024.07.010
• 发表日期: 2024
• 页码: 68-81
• 关键词: coordination; Focal points; Level-k; Team reasoning

摘要

Are people skillful in utilizing potential focal points? We find a class of situations for which the answer is negative: the presence of prominent actions appears to stymie the use of distinct actions for coordination. Across several experimental games, we consistently observe that players readily coordinate on a categorically distinct action when all available actions are non-prominent but not when some actions are prominent. For instance, given the action set {Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Tianjin}, most players select the Chinese city Tianjin. Yet, given {Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Tianjin}, they are roughly equally likely to select either American president and unlikely to select Tianjin, and given {Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Shanghai}, their choices are distributed approximately uniformly. The observation that prominence stymies reliance on distinctiveness informs cognitive hierarchy and team reasoning theories of how people recognize focality.