Exploring the effects of real effort in a weak-link experiment

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 performance in the group. While in the initial rounds our subjects typically coordinate on inefficient outcomes, almost 80 percent of the groups are able to overcome coordination failure in the later rounds. Our results are in stark contrast to results typically reported in the literature.