Purely rational play in coordination games

Sammanfattning

We study the behaviour of rational players in pure coordination games, that is, situations in which players work towards a common goal without any competitiveness involved. Formally, these are strategic form games where the payoffs are always equal among all players. This thesis is divided into three parts. In Part I, we build upon and discuss rational principles for coordination games introduced in a paper by Goranko et al. (2020). These principles aim to describe the commonality between how all rational players play when given an abstract coordination game with no conventions or communication. We question the pure rationality of some of these principles, and introduce a number of original principles, some of which we can more confidently say are purely rational. Furthermore, we introduce what we call quotient games as a means to reduce games, formulate principles, and motivate their rationality. In Part II, we discuss rational principles in games with additional structure. We introduce games with hidden information and limited communication and discuss how principles from Part I can be applied or generalised to these games. In Part III, we conduct a small-scale survey to investigate people's behaviour in some of the games studied. Specifically, we test which of the potentially rational principles introduced are followed in practice.