Christoph Kuzmics, KFUG: How pedestrians avoid bumping into each other: Communication before coordination

Abstract:

Using the motivating example of how pedestrians avoid colliding with each other, I investigate the conditions under which communication helps to prevent miscoordination. I study a coordination game with independent private values. Before playing the game, players can send costless messages. These messages are observed by both players before they make their choices in the coordination game.  This coordination game with cheap talk has multiple Bayes’ Nash equilibria. I identify conditions under which there is an essentially unique evolutionary stable equilibrium among them which is such that there is no miscoordination. I also identify conditions under which there is no such equilibrium and some miscoordination is inevitable.

This project is work in progress and I do not yet have a written paper that I could circulate. However, I have an earlier working paper about the same topic but without communication that is available here: ssrn.com/abstract=2391198.