Coordination via delay: Theory and experiment

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Jin, Ye; Zhou, Zhen; Brandenburger, Adam
• 署名单位: New York University; NYU Shanghai; Tsinghua University; New York University; New York University Tandon School of Engineering
• 刊物名称: GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0899-8256
• DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2022.11.001
• 发表日期: 2023
• 页码: 23-49
• 关键词: coordination; forward induction; Iterated weak dominance

摘要

This paper studies the effect of introducing an option of delay in coordination games- that is, of allowing players to wait and then choose between the risk-dominant and payoff-dominant actions. The delay option enables forward-induction reasoning to operate, whereby a player's waiting and not choosing the risk-dominant action right away signals an intention to choose the payoff-dominant action later. If players have epsilon-social preferences- they help others if they can do so at no cost to themselves-then iterated weak dominance yields a unique outcome in which everyone waits and then chooses the payoff-dominant action if everyone else waited. Thus, efficient coordination results. Experimental evidence from a binary-action minimum-effort game confirms that adding a delay option can significantly increase the occurrence of efficient outcomes. Moreover, consistent with our theory, the clear majority of subjects in our experiment take the unique iteratedly undominated strategy and not other strategies that are implied by equilibrium analysis.(c) 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).