Coordination, focal points and voting in strategic situations: a natural experiment

Ganna Pogrebna and Pavlo Blavatskyy

No 403, IEW - Working Papers from Institute for Empirical Research in Economics - University of Zurich

Abstract: This paper studies coordination in a multi-stage elimination tournament with large monetary incentives and a diversified subject pool drawn from the adult British population. In the tournament, members of an ad hoc team earn money by answering general knowledge questions and then eliminate one contestant by plurality voting without prior communication. We find that in the early rounds of the tournament, contestants use a focal principle and coordinate on one of the multiple Nash equilibria in pure strategies by eliminating the weakest member of the team. However, in the later rounds, contestants switch to playing a mixed strategy Nash equilibrium.

Keywords: Coordination; focal point; voting in strategic situations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C93 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-gth and nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/51857/1/iewwp403.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zur:iewwpx:403

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IEW - Working Papers from Institute for Empirical Research in Economics - University of Zurich
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Severin Oswald ().