The Nature of Salience Revisited: Cognitive Hierarchy Theory versus Team Reasoning

This paper reports experimental tests of two alternative explanations of how players use focal points to select equilibria in one-shot coordination games. Cognitive hierarchy theory explains coordination as the result of common beliefs about players’ pre-reflective inclinations towards the relevant strategies; the theory of team reasoning explains it as the result of the players’ using a non-standard form of reasoning. We report two experiments; one finds support for the first theory, the other for the second. In the light of additional questionnaire evidence, we conclude that players’ reasoning is sensitive to the decision context.