Rational coordination with no communication or conventions

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>We study pure coordination games where in every outcome, all players have identical payoffs, ‘win’ or ‘lose’. We identify and discuss a range of ‘purely rational principles’ guiding the reasoning of rational players in such games and compare the classes of coordination games that can be solved by such players with no preplay communication or conventions. We observe that it is highly nontrivial to delineate a boundary between purely rational principles and other decision methods, such as conventions, for solving such coordination games.</jats:p>

Rational Coordination in Games with Enriched Representations

“…Thus, the present work is related, at least in spirit, to previous studies on focal points and conventions, originating from Schelling [6] and Lewis [4] and further developed in the context of coordination games in, e.g., [7], [5], [8]. However, the relation with that (and other) previous work on coordination and conventions is mainly conceptual, whereas both the technical framework introduced in [2] and expanded here, and the study of the effect of enriched representations of coordination games in that framework are, to the best of our knowledge, our original contributions. Some related considerations regarding symmetries in coordination games, in a technically different framework have been investigated in [1].…”

“…We begin with the definition of win-lose coordination games. As in [2] we define them as relational structures, which is technically convenient for our study.…”

“…Pure win-lose coordination games (WLC games) ( [2]) are strategic form games in which all players receive the same payoffs, either 1 (win) or 0 (lose), and thus all players have the same preference, viz. to coordinate on any winning outcome.…”

“…This paper is a sequel to [2] (see also the extended version [3]), where we identified a hierarchy of principles of reasoning that rational players may apply in WLC games when they cannot use preplay communication and do not share any previously agreed-upon conventions. Additionally, [2] also provides a comparative analysis of the classes of WLC games that can be solved by applying such rational principles.…”

“…As in [2], we assume that the players are rational and commonly believe to pursue the same goal (to coordinate). Futhermore, we assume that the full structure of the game is represented to all the players and is commonly known to them.…”