Harmony of Games in Normal Form

Game harmony is a generic game property that can be used to predict cooperation in both generic and well-known normal form games. It describes how harmonious (non-conflictual) or disharmonious (conflictual) the interests of players are, as embodied in the payoffs. Pure coordination games are games of complete harmony, and constant-sum games of pure disharmony: the majority of games is somewhere in the middle. This paper provides measures of game harmony, analyzes their properties and reviews their use as predictors of cooperation in games. Framing effects increasing cooperation may work by increasing perceived game harmony.