On Smiles, Winks and Handshakes as Coordination Devices
通过最小努力博弈实验，研究微笑、眨眼和握手等简单信号能否帮助玩家识别彼此可信度，从而协调到更高效但风险更大的帕累托最优均衡。
In an experimental study we examine a variant of the minimum effort game, a coordination game with Pareto ranked equilibria and risk considerations pointing to the least efficient equilibrium. We focus on the question whether simple cues such as smiles, winks and handshakes could be recognised and employed by the players as a tell-tale sign of each other’s trustworthiness, thus enabling them to coordinate on the more risky but more rewarding Pareto efficient equilibrium. Our experimental results show that such cues may indeed play a role as coordination devices as their information value is significant and substantial. Many social interactions can be modelled as coordination games, i.e., games with multiple possible solutions. In such games agents share a common interest in the sense that a desired outcome is only achieved if all agents coordinate on the same solution. If several alternative solutions are available, coordination may be difficult to achieve even when miscoordination is very costly, a situation familiar when for instance trying to meet a friend in a city never visited before without having arranged for a precise meeting point in advance. This problem does not disappear when the various co-ordinated outcomes (equilibria) are Pareto ranked, so that one meeting point, say, is