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Patience, cognitive skill and coordination in the repeated stag hunt

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  • Al-Ubaydli, Omar
  • Jones, Garett
  • Weel, Jaap

Abstract

Coordination games have become a critical tool of analysis in fields such as development and institutional economics. Understanding behavior in coordination games is an important step towards understanding the differing success of teams, firms and nations. This paper investigates the relationship between personal attributes (cognitive ability, risk-aversion, patience) and behavior and outcomes in coordination games, an issue that, to the best of our knowledge, has never been studied before. For the repeated coordination game that we consider, we find that: (1) cognitive ability has no bearing on any aspect of behavior or outcomes; (2) pairs of players who are more patient are more likely to coordinate well and earn higher payoffs; and (3) risk-aversion has no bearing on any aspect of behavior or outcomes. These results are robust to controlling for personality traits and demographic characteristics.

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File URL: http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/27723/1/MPRA_paper_27723.pdf
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Paper provided by University Library of Munich, Germany in its series MPRA Paper with number 27723.

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Date of creation: 29 Dec 2010
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Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:27723
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Keywords: Coordination; IQ; personality; discount rate; patience; risk-aversion;

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
  • D23 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Organizational Behavior; Transaction Costs; Property Rights
  • D02 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Institutions: Design, Formation, Operations, and Impact
  • O12 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development

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Cited by:

  1. Gill, David & Prowse, Victoria, 2012. "Cognitive ability and learning to play equilibrium: A level-k analysis," MPRA Paper 38317, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 23 Apr 2012.
  2. Büyükboyacı, Mürüvvet, 2014. "Risk attitudes and the stag-hunt game," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 124(3), pages 323-325.
  3. Al-Ubaydli, Omar & Jones, Garett & Weel, Jaap, 2014. "Average player traits as predictors of cooperation in a repeated prisoner's dilemma," MPRA Paper 55383, University Library of Munich, Germany.

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