Fuzzy Play, Matching Devices and Coordination Failures

Abstract

We revisit n-player coordination games with Pareto-ranked Nash equilibria. The novelty is that we introduce fuzzy play and a matching device, where each player does not choose which pure strategy to play, but instead chooses a nonempty subset of his strategy set that he submits to the matching device. The matching device is a very simple one. It only selects a match if possible, and it selects randomly some strategy belonging to the strategy set sent by each player otherwise. That is, it does not impose that the best alternatives are matched. Using the concepts of perfect Nash equilibrium and of trembling-hand perfect rationalizability, we show that players coordinate directly on the Pareto optimal outcome. This implies that they neither use the option of fuzzy play, nor make use of the matching device.