Are communication failures common? We revisit a classic example of experimental coordination failure and explore, in a 2x2 design, the effects of deviation costs and loss avoidance. Our results suggest how to engineer coordination successes in the laboratory, and possibly in the wild.

We study the effects of loaded instructions in a bribery experiment. We find a strong gender effect: men and women react differently to real-world framing. The treatment effect becomes significant once we allow for genderspecific coefficients. Our paper contributes to the (small) literature on...

We investigate the decisions of individuals in simple and complex environments. We use a version of the Guessing Game (Beauty-contest Game) as a vehicle for our investigation, employing mathematically talented students. We find that our subjects think in complex environments more carefully...

Coordination games with Pareto-ranked equilibria have attracted major theoretical attention over the past two decades. Two early path-breaking sets of experimental studies were widely interpreted as suggesting that coordination failure is a common phenomenon in the laboratory. We identify the...

We report results from a weak-link – often also called minimum-effort – game experiment with multiple Pareto-ranked strict pure-strategy Nash equilibria, using a real-effort rather than a chosen-effort task: subjects have to sort and count coins and their payoff depends on the worst...

Are communication failures common? We revisit a classic example of experimental coordination failure and explore, in a 2x2 design, the effects of deviation costs and loss avoidance. Our results suggest how to engineer coordination successes in the laboratory, and possibly in the wild.

Tournaments of heterogeneous candidates can be thought of as probabilistic mechanisms that select high-quality agents. We quantify the efficiency of such selection by the likelihood of selecting the best player, here termed the "predictive power." We study three widely used tournament formats:...