What Price Coordination? The Efficiency-enhancing Effect of Auctioning the Right to Play.
A model is proposed to explain the results of recent experiments in which subjects repeatedly played a coordination game, with the right to play auctioned each period in a larger group. Subjects bid the market-clearing price to a level recoverable only in the efficient equilibrium and then converged...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Journal article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
American Economic Association
1998
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| Summary: | A model is proposed to explain the results of recent experiments in which subjects repeatedly played a coordination game, with the right to play auctioned each period in a larger group. Subjects bid the market-clearing price to a level recoverable only in the efficient equilibrium and then converged to that equilibrium, although subjects playing the game without auctions converged to inefficient equilibria. The efficiency-enhancing effect of auctions is reminiscent of forward induction but is not explained by equilibrium refinements. The model explains it by showing how strategic uncertainty interacts with history-dependent learning dynamics to determine equilibrium selection. |
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