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Learning and sophistication in coordination games

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Kyle Hyndman ,
Antoine Terracol  and
Jonathan Vaksmann
Kyle Hyndman*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Southern Methodist University, 3300 Dyer Street, 301R, Dallas, TX 75275, USA
Antoine Terracol*
Affiliation:
EQUIPPE and Centre d’Économie de la Sorbonne, Universités de Lille, Université Paris 1—Panthéon Sorbonne, CNRS, Paris, France
Jonathan Vaksmann*
Affiliation:
Centre d’Économie de la Sorbonne, Université Paris 1—Panthéon Sorbonne, CNRS, Paris, France
*
e-mail: [email protected]
e-mail: [email protected]
e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This paper studies the role of strategic teaching in coordination games and whether changing the incentives of players to teach leads to more efficient coordination. We ran experiments where subjects played one of four coordination games in constant pairings, where the incentives to teach were varied along two dimensions— the short run cost of teaching and the long run benefit to teaching. We show which aspects of the game lead subjects to adopt long run teaching strategies, and show that subjects try to manipulate their opponent's actions to pull them out of a situation of coordination failure. We also show that extending a model of decision making by introducing a forward-looking component helps to track teachers’ behaviour more accurately, and describes the way players behave in a more unified way across both teachers and learners.

Keywords

Game theoryLearningTeachingCoordinationExperiment

JEL classification

D43: Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection C91: Laboratory, Individual Behavior D83: Search • Learning • Information and Knowledge • Communication • Belief • Unawareness
Type
Research Article
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 12 , Issue 4 , December 2009 , pp. 450 - 472
Copyright
Copyright © Economic Science Association 2009

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Footnotes

We would like to thank the Co-Editor, Jordi Brandts, and two anonymous referees whose suggestions have led to a substantially improved version. We are very indebted to participants at various conferences and seminars for valuable comments. We also thank Maxim Frolov for his technical assistance. Financial support from SMU (URC Grant), the CNRS and Louis Lévy-Garboua (PPF project) is gratefully acknowledged. All remaining errors are our own.

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10683-009-9223-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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