A Beautiful Blonde: a Nash coordination game

In a memorable scene from the …lm ”A Beautiful Mind,” John Nash explains to his friends how to direct their attentions to women in a bar. Game theorists who have seen the …lm point out that the proposed solution is not a Nash equilibrium. Here we determine the Nash equilibria to the attention game. The symmetric mixed strategy equilibrium has resembles a common property resource problem. It has perverse comparative static properties that are not borne out by experimental data. Finally, we discuss alternative ways of formulating the game.