Strategic Delay and Coordination Efficiency in Global Games
This addresses coordination efficiency in strategic settings, but it is incremental as it builds on existing global games models.
The paper tackles a two-stage collective decision-making problem where agents can delay participation to gain information, showing that this trade-off improves coordination and increases efficiency.
We investigate a coordination model for a two-stage collective decision-making problem within the framework of global games. The agents observe noisy signals of a shared random variable, referred to as the fundamental, which determines the underlying payoff. Based on these signals, the agents decide whether to participate in a collective action now or to delay. An agent who delays acquires additional information by observing the identities of agents who have chosen to participate in the first stage. This informational advantage, however, comes at the cost of a discounted payoff if coordination ultimately succeeds. Within this decision-making framework, we analyze how the option to delay can enhance collective outcomes. We show that this intertemporal trade-off between information acquisition and payoff reduction can improve coordination and increase the efficiency of collective decision-making.