3 - Pure Coordination Games and the Minimal Social Situation

Abstract

This chapter discusses the two classes of games in which the player's interests are served by strategic collaboration. It focuses on pure coordination games characterized by complete coincidence of the player's interests. Although many of these games elude formal analysis, informal game theory usually uncovers prominent strategies and focal points that allow players with well-developed strategic intuition to coordinate tacitly through telepathic communication. Such empirical evidence strongly confirms the prediction that successful coordination will often occur even when there are no logical solutions. The chapter explains the theory and experimental evidence concerning the minimal social situation, which was interpreted as a class of games of incomplete formation. In the strictly minimal social situation, the players are unaware, not only of the payoff structure of the game, but even of each other's existence. Theory and experimental evidence reveal that strategic collaboration can develop when these games are played a number of times in succession. The win-stay, lose-change principle, derived from the law of effect, permits unambiguous though non-obvious predictions to be made about choices in the minimal social situation, and experimental evidence has generally confirmed these predictions.