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Maximum effort in the minimum-effort game

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Dirk Engelmann  and
Hans-Theo Normann
Dirk Engelmann*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX, UK
Hans-Theo Normann*
Affiliation:
Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE), Düsseldorf University, 40225 Düsseldorf, Germany
*
e-mail: dirk.engelmann@rhul.ac.uk
e-mail: normann@dice.uni-duesseldorf.de
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Abstract

We report results from standard minimum-effort experiments conducted in Copenhagen (Denmark). Our subjects frequently coordinate on the Pareto-efficient equilibrium even in groups of six. This is in stark contrast to the previous literature, as we show in a detailed analysis of experiments which had the same design but were held in different countries. The subject-pool effect is substantiated by the finding that, the higher the share of Danish subjects in a group, the higher the minimum-effort levels. These findings suggest that the prevalent coordination failures previously observed are affected by significant subject-pool effects.

Keywords

Minimum-effort gameCoordination gameExperimentSocial capital

JEL classification

C91: Laboratory, Individual Behavior C92: Laboratory, Group Behavior C72: Noncooperative Games
Type
Research Article
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , September 2010 , pp. 249 - 259
Copyright
Copyright © Economic Science Association 2010

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Footnotes

Dirk Engelmann is also an Affiliate of the Center for Experimental Economics at the University of Copenhagen and a Senior Researcher at the Economics Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, v.v.i.

Hans-Theo Normann is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods and a fellow at ENCORE.

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi: 10.1007/s10683-010-9239-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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