Behavioral Strategies in Repeated Pure Coordination Games

We study experimentally a class of pure coordination games as a special case of the Consumer Choice of Prizes game developed by Rapoport et al. (2000). We find a high level of group coordination coupled with considerable switching in the choice of locations. Two models are proposed and tested to account for the results, one postulating the formation of conventions, and the other invoking the mixed strategy equilibrium solution for risk-neutral players. We reject both models as possible candidates to describe the behavioral regularities that we observe in the data. A third model that allows individual perturbations of commonly shared choice probabilities is proposed and tested. It accounts for the major results on the individual and aggregate levels.