Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/235382 
Year of Publication: 
2021
Series/Report no.: 
CESifo Working Paper No. 9012
Publisher: 
Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute (CESifo), Munich
Abstract: 
Situations where independent agents need to align their activities to achieve individually and socially beneficial outcomes are abundant, reaching from everyday situations like fixing a time for a meeting to global problems like climate change agreements. Often such situations can be described as stag-hunt games, where coordinating on the socially efficient outcome is individually optimal but also entails a risk of losing out. Previous work has shown that in fixed interaction neighborhoods agents’ behavior mostly converges to collectively inefficient outcome. However, in the field, interaction neighborhoods often can be self-determined. Theoretical work investigating such circumstances is ambiguous in whether the efficient or inefficient outcome will prevail. We performed an experiment with human subjects exploring how free neighborhood choice affects coordination. In a fixed interaction treatment, a vast majority of subjects quickly coordinates on the inefficient outcome. In a treatment with neighborhood choice, the outcome is dramatically different: behavior quickly converges to the socially desirable outcome leading to welfare gains 2.5 times higher than in the environment without neighborhood choice. Participants playing efficiently exclude those playing inefficiently who in response change their behavior and are subsequently included again. Importantly, this mechanism is effective despite that only few exclusions actually occur.
Subjects: 
stag-hunt
neighborhood choice
coordination
social welfare
exclusion
JEL: 
C72
C90
D03
Document Type: 
Working Paper
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