Talking Ourselves to Efficiency: Coordination in Inter-Generational Minimum Effort Games with Private, Almost Common and Common Knowledge of Advice

Abstract

We use experiments to investigate the use of advice as a coordinating device in the ‘Minimum Effort Game’ which is a coordination game with weak strategic complementarities and Pareto-ranked equilibria. The game is played by non-overlapping generations of players who, after they are done, pass on advice to their successors who take their place in the game. We conjectured that this inter-generational design might enable subjects to converge to the payoff-dominant outcome. We find that coordination is most likely to result when the advice is made public and also distributed in a manner that makes it common knowledge.