Dresden 2014 – scientific programme
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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik
DY 31: Evolutionary Game Theory and Economic Models (joint session SOE/ BP/ DY)
DY 31.2: Talk
Thursday, April 3, 2014, 11:15–11:30, GÖR 226
Human coordination in the presence of local and global information: A laboratory experiment — •Alberto Antonioni1,2, Marco Tomassini1, and Angel Sánchez2 — 1University of Lausanne, Switzerland — 2Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
Pure coordination games arise in many situations that affect the functioning of society. In fact, many frequent social and economic activities require individuals to coordinate their actions on a common goal since in many cases the best course of action is to conform to the standard behavior. In particular, social coordination can be studied through coordination games between individuals located in space. Here we study the behavior of humans in the laboratory when they play a pure coordination game in a setting in which subjects are situated in a virtual two-dimensional grid space and can move around. We compare a local information setting situation to one in which global information is available. In the local information treatment subjects can see only the eight cells that are their spatial neighbors in the grid and they can decide if they want to move and/or pay a cost to switch to the other strategy type. In the global treatment subjects are in the same condition as before but they possess also the global information about the current fraction of strategies in the population. We observe that in the local information treatment people tend to converge to two separated monomorphic clusters each playing a different strategy. In contrast, in the global setting this can lead to full predominance of one strategy when strategy fluctuations reach a threshold such that imitation of the majority sets in.