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

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

Stochastic Stability in the Best Shot Game

The best shot game applied to networks is a discrete model of many processes of contribution to local public goods. It has generally a wide multiplicity of equilibria that we refine through stochastic stability. In this paper we show that, depending on how we define perturbations, i.e. the possible mistakes that agents can make, we can obtain very different sets of stochastically stable equilibria. In particular and non-trivially, if we assume that the only possible source of error is that of an agent contributing that stops doing so, then the only stochastically stable equilibria are those in which the maximal number of players contributes.Networks, Best Shot Game, Stochastic Stability