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...

Collective action problems arise in a variety of situations. The economic theory of public good provision raises a number of important questions. Who contributes to the public good, and who free rides? How might a social planner exploit the interdependence of decision-making to encourage...

The volunteer`s dilemma is an asymmetric n-player binary-action game in which a public good is provided if and only if at least one player volunteers, and consequently bears some private cost. So long as the value generated for every player exceeds this private cost there are n pure-strategy...

In the context of macroeconomic coordination, studies of the social value of information distinguish sharply between private and public information.  However, no information is truly public (that is, common knowledge) or private in the established sense.  This paper develops a general approach...

This paper studies n-player collective-action games in which a public good is produced if and only if m or more volunteers contribute to it. Quantal-response strategy revisions allow play to move between equilibria in which a team of m players successfully provide, and an equilibrium in which...

In the context of a "beauty contest" coordination game (in which pay-offs depend on the proximity of actions to an unobserved state variable and to the average action) players choose how much costly attention to pay to various informative signals; they endogenously select information sources and...

In a collective-action game a player`s payoff is the sum of (i) a private component that depends only on that player`s action, and (ii) a public component, common to all players and dependent upon all actions. A classic application is the private provision of a public good. Play evolves:...