Rational coordination with no communication or conventions
This addresses a foundational problem in game theory for researchers studying rational decision-making and coordination mechanisms.
The paper tackles the problem of pure coordination games where players have identical payoffs, investigating purely rational principles that enable coordination without communication or conventions, and finds it highly nontrivial to distinguish these principles from other methods.
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 analyze which classes of coordination games 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.