An Evolutionary Approach to Tacit Communication in Van Huyck, Battalio, and Beil's Game Experiments

This paper provides an evolutionary interpretation of Van Huyck, Battalio, and Beil's experimental results on coordination games with auction. A set- valued solution concept is defined for a finite population model under the best response evolutionary dynamics and applied to their games. It is shown that our solution concept captures the role of auction as a tacit communication device and predicts the equilibria chosen by players in the real experiments. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers C72, C92.