Coordination problems arise in a multitude of economic interactions. Recent advances in the field of game theory have shed new light on these problems and the ways in which they might be analysed. This issue of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy first examines some of the theoretical...

In a Lucas-Phelps island economy, an island has access to many informative signals about demand conditions. Each signal incorporates both public and private information: the correlation of a signal׳s realizations across the economy determines its publicity. If information sources differ in...

In the context of a "beauty-contest" coordination game (in which pay-offs depend on the quadratic distance of actions from an unobserved state variable and from the average action), players choose how much costly attention to pay to various informative signals. Each signal has an underlying...

The payoffs of a symmetric 2x2 coordination game are perturbed by agent-specific heterogeneity. Individuals observe a (possibly sampled) history of play, which forms the initial hypothesis for an opponents behaviour. Seeding beliefs in this manner, they iteratively reason toward a Bayesian Nash...

A rational player will never play a strictly dominated strategy. It might be tempting therefore to eliminate such strategies from any subsequent analysis. However, if equilibrium selection is an issue it may be wrong to do so. In models of adaptive learning with state-independence mutations,...

A strategy revision process in symmetric normal form games is proposed. Following Kandori, Mailath, and Rob (1993), members of a population periodically revise their strategy choice, and choose a myopic best response to currently observed play. Their payoffs are perturbed by normally distributed...

Equilibrium selection in coordination games has generated a large literature. Kandori, Mailath and Rob (1993) and Young (1993) studied dynamic models of aggregate behaviour in which agents choose best responses to observations of population play. Crucially, infrequent mistakes (`mutations`)...

This paper studies collective-action games in which the production of a public good requires teamwork. A leading example is a threshold game in which provision requires the voluntary participation of m out of n players. Quantal-response strategy revisions allow play to move between equilibria in...

Collective-action problems arise in a variety of situations. Open-source software is a recent and important example. Copyright restrictions on open-source projects stipulate that any user may modify the software so long as any resulting innovation is freely available to all. In economic...