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.

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...

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.