Costly Pre‐Play Communication and Coordination in Stag‐Hunt Games

In this paper, we experimentally investigate the impact of costly indirect and direct messages on coordination levels in a stag‐hunt game. Three main insights emerge from our experiments. First, we find a significant decrease in message usage with message cost in both treatments and a higher decrease in the indirect‐message treatment. Second, we find that although there is no significant effect of costless or costly indirect messages on the frequency of risky actions, both costless, and costly direct messages significantly increase the frequency of risky actions. Third, while we find a significant increase in the coordination rate on the payoff‐dominant equilibrium from costless indirect message treatment to costly indirect message treatment, this rate significantly decreases from costless direct message to costly direct message treatment. Our findings show that depending on the structure of messages, message cost may increase or decrease the coordination rates on the payoff‐dominant equilibrium with respect to costless communication. However, costly communication increases efficient coordination rates with respect to the no communication baseline. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.