Using a laboratory experiment, we examine whether informal monetary sanctions can lead to better coordination in a repeated minimum effort coordination game. While most groups first experience inefficient coordination, the efficiency increases substantially after introducing an ex post...

Cooperation norms often emerge in situations, where the long term collective benefits help to overcome short run individual interests, for instance in repeated Prisoner´s Dilemma (PD) situations. Often, however, there are different paths to cooperation, benefiting different kinds of actors to...

In minority games, players in a group must decide at each round which of two available options to choose, knowing that only subjects who picked the minority option obtain a positive reward. Previous experiments on the minority and similar congestion games have shown that players interacting...

Games with multiple Nash equilibria are believed to be easier to play if players can communicate. We present a simple model of communication in games and investigate the importance of when communication takes place. Sending a message before play captures talk about intentions, after play...

Intuitively, we expect that players who are allowed to engage in costless communication before playing a game would be foolish to agree on an inefficient equilibrium. At the same time, however, such preplay communication has been suggested as a rationale for expecting Nash equilibrium in...

Some private-monitoring games, that is, games with no public histories, can have histories that are almost public. These games are the natural result of perturbing public monitoring games towards private monitoring. We explore the extent to which it is possible to coordinate continuation play in...

This paper combines two strands of the experimental sunspot literature. It extends the rare literature that focuses experimentally on the coordination problems caused by sunspot variables. It also extends the literature that focuses on coordination games that have a payoff-dominant and a...

It is commonly assumed that friendship should generally benefit agents' ability to tacitly coordinate with others. However, this has never been tested on two "opposite poles" of coordination, namely, games of strategic complements and substitutes. We present an experimental study in which...

It is commonly assumed that friendship should decrease strategic uncertainty in games involving tacit coordination. However, this has never been tested on two "opposite poles" of coordination, namely, games of strategic complements and substitutes. We present an experimental study having...

In many real-life situations people face a simple decision whether to volunteer or not to provide some benefit for themselves and also for others. This research investigates the effects of the group size and the magnitude of the volunteering cost in a controlled large-scale laboratory...