Patience, cognitive skill, and coordination in the repeated stag hunt

Abstract

Coordination games have become a critical tool of analysis in fields such as development and institutional economics. Understanding behavior in coordination games is an important step toward understanding the differing success of teams, firms, and nations. This article investigates the relationship between personal attributes (cognitive ability, risk-aversion, patience) and behavior and outcomes in coordination games, an issue that, to the best of our knowledge, has never been studied before. For the repeated coordination game that we consider, we find the following: (1) cognitive ability has no statistically significant bearing on any aspect of behavior or outcomes; (2) pairs of players who are more patient are more likely to coordinate well and earn higher payoffs; and (3) risk-aversion has no statistically significant bearing on any aspect of behavior or outcomes. These results are robust to controlling for personality traits and demographic characteristics.