A common finding in social sciences is that member change hinders group functioning and performance. However, questions remain as to why member change negatively affects group performance and what are some ways to alleviate the negative effects of member change on performance? To answer these...

Greif, Milgrom and Weingast (1994) argued that the ability of the merchant guilds to encourage trade expansion required an internal mechanism to enforce compliance to trade embargoes, otherwise credible incentives for "embargo breaking" would have rendered them ine¤ectual. We show that...

Games with multiple Nash equilibria are believed to be easier to play if players can communicate. We present a simple model of communication in games and investigate the importance of when communication takes place. Sending a message before play captures talk about intentions, after play...

Motivated by problems of coordination failure observed in weak-link games, we experimentally investigate behavioral spillovers for minimum- and median-effort coordination games. Subjects play these coordination games simultaneously and sequentially. The results show that successful coordination...

This experiment investigates contests between groups. Each group has one strong player, with a higher valuation for the prize, and two weak players, with lower valuations. In contests where individual efforts are perfect substitutes, all players expend significantly higher efforts than predicted...

We study experimentally how the network structure and length of pre-play communication affect behavior and outcome in a multi-player coordination game with conflicting preferences. Network structure matters but the interaction between network and time effects is more subtle. Under each time...

This report presents the results of a replication, with 199 culturally-diverse subjects, of Thomas Schelling’s (1957) experiments on tacit coordination. Section 1 introduces the concept of focal point equilibrium selection in tacit one-shot symmetric pure coordination games, as presented by...