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

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Author Info
Ganna Pogrebna
Pavlo Blavatskyy
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.

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Paper provided by Institute for Empirical Research in Economics - IEW in its series IEW - Working Papers with number iewwp403.

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Date of creation: Feb 2009
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Handle: RePEc:zur:iewwpx:403

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Related research
Keywords: Coordination; focal point; voting in strategic situations;

Find related papers by JEL classification:
C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games
C93 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Field Experiments
D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Models of Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior

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