COORDINATION IN MARKET ENTRY GAMES WITH SYMMETRICAL PLAYERS

We report the results of two experiments designed to study tacit coord ination in a class of market entry games with linear payoff functions, binary decisions, and zero entry costs, in which each of n = 20 playe rs must decide on each trial whether or not to enter a market whose ca pacity is public knowledge. The results show that although the subject s differ considerably from one another in their decision policies, tac it coordination emerges quickly on the aggregate level and is accounte d for most successfully by the Nash equilibrium solution for noncooper ative n-person games. (C) 1995 Academic Press, Inc.