Efficiency Gains from Team-Based Coordination-Large-Scale Experimental Evidence

摘要

Coordination problems prevail in a large variety of contexts, such as organizational design, technology adoption and diffusion, monopolistic competition, speculative attacks on currency markets, or bank runs, to name just a few (see, e.g., Thomas C. Schelling 1980; James W. Friedman 1994; Colin F. Camerer and Marc J. Knez 1997; or Russell Cooper 1999, for more examples). Due to the ubiquity of coordination problems and the eminent importance of successful coordination for the functioning of firms, organizations, or industries, there is a large body of research in economics on coordination games with multiple, often Pareto-ranked, pure strategy equilibria. Coordination games have captured so much interest not only because they resemble many relevant real-world situations, but also because they are genuinely interesting from a game-theoretical perspective, as they address the issue of equilibrium selection (John Harsanyi and Reinhard Selten 1988), which is one of the hardest challenges in game theory.