Abstract:

Coordination behavior is studies experimentally in a class of market entry games featuring symmetric players, complete information, zero entry costs, and several randomly presented values of the market capacity. Once the market capacity, c, becomes common knowledge, each player must decide privately whether to enter the market and receive a payoff which increases in the difference between c and the number of entrants, m, or stay out. Payoffs forstaying out are either positive, giving rise to the domain of gains, or negative, giving rise to the domain of losses. The major findings are substantial individual differences in decision policies, which do not diminish with practice, and aggregate group behavior which is organized extremely well in both the domains of gains and loses by the Nash equilibrium solution.

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