This paper studies the role of strategic teaching in coordination games and whether changing the incentives of players to teach leads to more efficient coordination. We ran experiments where subjects played one of four coordination games in constant pairings, where the incentives to teach were varied along two dimensions -the short run cost of teaching and the long run benefit to teaching. We show which aspects of the game lead subjects to adopt long run teaching strategies, and show that subjects try to manipulate their opponent's actions to pull them out of a situation of coordination failure. We also show that extending a model of decision making by introducing a forward-looking component helps to track teachers' behaviour more accurately, and describes the way players behave in a more unified way across both teachers and learners.

This paper uses experimental data to examine the existence of a teaching strategy among bounded rational players. If players realize that their own actions modify their opponents' beliefs and actions, they might play certain actions to this specific end; and forego immediate payoffs if the expected payoff gain from a teaching strategy is high enough. Our results support the existence of a teaching strategy in several ways: First they show that players update their beliefs in order to take account of the reaction of their opponents to their own action. Second, we examine if players actually use a teaching strategy by playing an action that induces a poor immediate payoff but is likely to modify the opponent's behavior so that a preferable outcome might emerge in the future. We find strong evidence of such a strategy in the data and confirm this finding within a logistic model which suggests that the future expected payoff that could arise from a teaching strategy has indeed a significant impact on choice probabilities. Finally, we investigate the effective impact of a teaching strategy on achieved outcomes and find that efficient teachers can successfully use teaching in order to reach their favorite outcome at the expense of their opponents. JEL codes: C72, C91, D83

In this paper, we use experimental data to study players' stability in normal-form games where subjects have to report beliefs and to choose actions. Subjects saw each of 12 games four times in a regular or isomorphic form spread over two days without feedback. We document a high degree of stability within the same (strategically equivalent) game, although time and changes in the presentation of the game do lead to less stability. To look at stability across different games, we adopt the level−k theory, and show that stability of both beliefs and actions is significantly lower. Finally, we estimate a structural model in which players either apply a consistent level of reasoning across strategically different games, or reasoning levels change from game to game. Our results show that approximately 30% of subjects apply a consistent level of reasoning across the 12 games, but that they assign a low level of sophistication to their opponent. The remaining 70% apply different levels of reasoning to different games.

International audienceWe study mutual-aid games in which individuals choose to contribute to an informal mutual insurance pool. Individual coverage is determined by the aggregate level of contributions and a sharing rule. We analyze theoretically and experimentally the (ex ante) efficiency of equal and contribution-based coverage. The equal coverage mechanism leads to a unique no-insurance equilibrium while contribution-based coverage develops multiple equilibria and improves efficiency. Experimentally, the latter treatment reduces the amount of transfers from high contributors to low contributors and generates a \dual interior equilibrium". That dual equilibrium is consistent with the co-existence of different prior norms which correspond to notable equilibria derived in the theory. This results in asymmetric outcomes with a majority of high contributors less than fully reimbursing the global losses and a significant minority of low contributors less than fully defecting. Such behavioral heterogeneity may be attributed to risk attitudes (risk tolerance vs risk aversion) which is natural in a risky context