The developmental states of Asia—South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore—have been widely recognized for their successful COVID-19 governance. However, despite these successes, a closer examination reveals significant differences in their strategic responses and the medical resources mobilized. This article explains the different governance approaches taken by the three developmental states. We argue that the pre-crisis industrial coordination capacity of each developmental state plays a crucial role in determining both whether and which medical resources can be mobilized during emergencies. Through comparative case studies and within-case process tracing, we demonstrate how pre-established industry-level coordination capacities enabled Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore to strategically prioritize the production and mobilization of test kits, masks, and vaccines, respectively, especially in the initial phase of the pandemic. This article emphasizes that a country’s domestic production capacity, an often-overlooked institutional factor, can facilitate a more efficient response in a short period of time and significantly strengthen crisis management efforts.

The current method used by the US Government to calculate benefits and costs does not accurately measure the monetary value of some regulations. The problem is that the method fails to recognize the possibility that individual valuations, reflecting judgments in a relatively isolated, uncoordinated situation, might be significantly different from individual valuations in a situation of coordination. For example, people might be willing to pay $X for a good, supposing that other people have that good, but might be willing to pay $Y to abolish that good, supposing that no one will have that good. Or people might be willing to pay $X to protect members of an endangered species in their individual capacity, but far more than $X for the same purpose, assuming that many others are paying as well; one reason may be that an individual expenditure seems futile. We sketch, identify, and explain this unmeasured value, which we define as coordination value, meant as an umbrella concept to cover several categories of cases in which individual valuation measured in the uncoordinated state might be inadequate. Changing the methodology of benefit–cost analysis to consider coordination value would present serious empirical challenges, but would eliminate the estimation error.

Wrong-doers may try to collaborate to achieve greater gains than would be possible alone. Yet potential collaborators face two issues: they need to accurately identify other cheaters and trust that their collaborators do not betray them when the opportunity arises. These concerns may be in tension, since the people who are genuine cheaters could also be the likeliest to be untrustworthy. We formalise this interaction in the ‘villain’s dilemma’ and use it in a laboratory experiment to study three questions: what kind of information helps people to overcome the villain’s dilemma? Does the villain’s dilemma promote or hamper cheating relative to individual settings? Who participates in the villain’s dilemma and who is a trustworthy collaborative cheater? We find that information has important consequences for behaviour in the villain’s dilemma. Public information about actions is important for supporting collaborative dishonesty, while more limited sources of information lead to back-stabbing and poor collaboration. We also find that the level of information, role of the decision maker, and round of the experiment affect whether dishonesty is higher or lower in the villain’s dilemma than in our individual honesty settings. Finally, individual factors are generally unrelated to collaborating but individual dishonesty predicts untrustworthiness as a collaborator.

The COVID-19 pandemic showed the vital role of Emergency Medical Teams (EMTs) in international surge responses. The EMTs with their internationally skilled team members were able to meaningfully support countries facing the pandemic, especially those who were suffering from scarcity in the quality and quantity of workforce and financial resources within their health systems. This report summarizes the main operational challenges faced by UK-Med and The Polish Center for International Aid (PCPM) Emergency Medical Teams, based on experiences from their 32 COVID-19 deployments. In particular, the paper discusses the hindrances related to Ministries of Health expectations and the changing roles of EMTs during deployments.

Motivated by problems of coordination failure in organizations, we examine how overcoming coordination failure and maintaining coordination depend on the ability of individuals to observe others’ choices. Subjects’ payoffs depend on coordinating at high effort levels in a weak-link game. Treatments vary along two dimensions. First, subjects either start with low financial incentives for coordination, which typically leads to coordination failure, and then are switched to higher incentives or start with high incentives, which usually yield effective coordination, and are switched to low incentives. Second, as the key treatment variable, subjects either observe the effort levels chosen by all individuals in their experimental group (full feedback) or observe only the minimum effort (limited feedback). We find three primary results: (1) When starting from coordination failure the use of full feedback improves subjects’ ability to overcome coordination failure, (2) When starting with good coordination the use of full feedback has no effect on subjects’ ability to avoid slipping into coordination failure, and (3) History-dependence, defined as dependence of current effort levels on past incentives, is strengthened by the use of full feedback.

Coordinating activity among members is an important problem faced by organizations. When firms, or units within firms, are stuck in bad equilibria, managers may turn to the temporary use of simple incentives—flat punishments or rewards—in an attempt to transition the firm or unit to a more efficient equilibrium. We investigate the use of incentives in the context of the “minimum-effort,” or “weak-link,” coordination game. We allow groups to reach the inefficient equilibrium and then implement temporary, flat, “all-or-none” incentives to encourage coordination on more efficient equilibria. We vary whether incentives are positive (rewards) or negative (penalties), whether they have substantial or nominal monetary value, and whether they are targeted to a specific outcome (the efficient equilibrium) or untargeted (apply to more than one outcome). Overall, incentives of all kinds are effective at improving coordination while they are in place, but there is little long-term persistent benefit of incentives—once incentives are removed, groups tend to return to the inefficient outcome. We find some differences between different kinds of incentives. Finally, we contrast our results to other recent work demonstrating greater long-term effectiveness of temporary incentives.

We investigate in a laboratory experiment whether procedural fairness concerns affect how well individuals are able to solve a coordination problem in a two-player Volunteer’s Dilemma. Subjects receive external action recommendations, either to volunteer or to abstain from it, in order to facilitate coordination and improve efficiency. We manipulate the fairness of the recommendation procedure by varying the probabilities of receiving the disadvantageous recommendation to volunteer between players. We find evidence that while recommendations improve overall efficiency regardless of their implications for expected payoffs, there are behavioural asymmetries depending on the recommendation: advantageous recommendations are followed less frequently than disadvantageous ones and beliefs about others’ actions are more pessimistic in the treatment with recommendations inducing unequal expected payoffs.

This paper reports an experiment designed to detect the influence of strategic uncertainty on behavior in order statistic coordination games, which arise when a player's best response is an order statistic of the cohort's action combination. Unlike previous experiments using order statistic coordination games, the new experiment holds the payoff function constant and only changes cohort size and order statistic.

Beliefs about other players’ strategies are crucial in determining outcomes for coordination games. If players are to coordinate on an efficient equilibrium, they must believe that others will coordinate with them. In many settings there is uncertainty about beliefs as well as strategies. Do people consider these “higher-order” beliefs (beliefs about beliefs) when making coordination decisions? I design a modified stag hunt experiment that allows me to identify how these higher-order beliefs and uncertainty about higher-order beliefs matter for coordination. Players prefer to invest especially when they believe that others are “optimistic” that they will invest; but knowledge that others think them unlikely to invest does not cause players to behave differently than when they do not know what their partners think about them. Thus resolving uncertainty about beliefs can result in marked efficiency gains.

Coordination games with Pareto-ranked equilibria have attracted major attention over the past two decades. Two early path-breaking sets of experimental studies were widely interpreted as suggesting that coordination failure is a common phenomenon in the laboratory. We identify the major determinants that seem to affect the incidence, and/or emergence, of coordination failure in the lab and review critically the existing experimental studies on coordination games with Pareto-ranked equilibria since that early evidence emerged. We conclude that there are many ways to engineer coordination successes.

We run a laboratory experiment to test the concept of coarse correlated equilibrium (Moulin and Vial in Int J Game Theory 7:201–221, 1978), with a two-person game with unique pure Nash equilibrium which is also the solution of iterative elimination of strictly dominated strategies. The subjects are asked to commit to a device that randomly picks one of three symmetric outcomes (including the Nash point) with higher ex-ante expected payoff than the Nash equilibrium payoff. We find that the subjects do not accept this lottery (which is a coarse correlated equilibrium); instead, they choose to play the game and coordinate on the Nash equilibrium. However, given an individual choice between a lottery with equal probabilities of the same outcomes and the sure payoff as in the Nash point, the lottery is chosen by the subjects. This result is robust against a few variations. We explain our result as selecting risk-dominance over payoff dominance in equilibrium.

Within-group communication in competitive coordination games has been shown to increase competition between groups and lower efficiency. This study further explores potentially harmful effects of communication, by addressing the questions of (1) asymmetric communication and (2) the endogenous emergence of communication. Our theoretical analysis provides testable hypotheses regarding the effect of communication on competitive behavior and efficiency. We test these predictions using a laboratory experiment. The experiment shows that although asymmetric communication is not as harmful as symmetric communication, it leads to more aggressive competition and lower efficiency relative to the case when neither group can communicate. Moreover, groups vote to endogenously establish communication channels even though they would earn higher payoffs if jointly they chose to restrict within-group communication.

This study considers a model of road congestion with average cost pricing. Subjects must choose between two routes—Road and Metro. The travel cost on the road is increasing in the number of commuters who choose this route, while the travel cost on the metro is decreasing in the number of its users. We examine how changes to the road capacity, the number of commuters, and the metro pricing scheme influence the commuters’ route-choice behavior. According to the Downs-Thomson paradox, improved road capacity increases travel times along both routes because it attracts more users to the road and away from the metro, thereby worsening both services. A change in route design generates two Nash equilibria; and the resulting coordination problem is amplified even further when the number of commuters is large. We find that, similar to other binary choice experiments with congestion effects, aggregate traffic flows are close to the equilibrium levels, but systematic individual differences persist over time.

We focus on a class of market entry games in which a newly emergent market opportunity may be fruitfully exploited by no more than a commonly known, exogenously determined number of firms. Our results show significant effects of the parameters manipulated in the study, namely, the market capacity, entry fee, and method of subject assignment to groups (fixed vs. random). In contrast to previous market entry games with linear payoff functions, we find no evidence of convergence to equilibrium play on the aggregate level. Shifting the focus of the analysis from the aggregate to the individual level, four clusters of subjects are identified. The patterns are: (1) choice of the same action that is independent of the parameters of the game or the outcome of previous presentations of the same game; (2) random choices with probabilities prescribed by the equilibrium solution for risk-neutral players; (3) random choices with probabilities equal to the individual observed overall proportion of entry; and (4) sequential dependencies that violate any model that assumes randomization. Subjects in the fourth and largest category are shown to adjust their choices in accordance with a simple principle of strategic reasoning.

We experimentally study optional costly communication in Stag-Hunt games. Prior research demonstrates that efficient coordination is difficult without a communication option but obtains regularly with mandatory costless pre-play messages. We find that even small communication costs dramatically reduce message use when communication is optional, but efficient coordination can occur with similar frequency as under costless communication. These findings can be accounted for by formalizations of forward induction that take Nash equilibrium as a reference point (such as Kohlberg and Mertens in Econometrica 54: 1003–1037, 1986; Govindan and Wilson in Econometrica 77: 1–28, 2009), while formalizations that only appeal to (higher-order) knowledge of rationality remain silent in this environment.

We use experiments to investigate the efficacy of recommended play and performance bonuses in resolving coordination failures in a stag-hunt type coordination game with multiple Pareto-ranked equilibria, often referred to as a “weak link” game. Participants routinely find it difficult to coordinate to the payoff-dominant outcome in such games. We look at performance in both fixed and randomly re-matched groups. A recommendation to the payoff-dominant outcome is successful in resolving coordination failures with fixed groups but only when this recommendation is “common knowledge” in the sense that all members of the group receive the same message and it is read out loud for everyone to hear. Resolving coordination failures is harder with randomly re-matched groups and the greatest success is achieved only upon payment of a performance bonus.

We theoretically and experimentally investigate a game in which exactly one person should make a costly effort to achieve a socially efficient outcome. This setting is commonly known as the volunteer’s dilemma. We implement one-way communication by allowing one player to send a message indicating whether she intends to volunteer and investigate the message’s effects on behavior and efficiency in the subsequent game. We theoretically demonstrate that there are asymmetric mixed-strategy equilibria in the volunteer’s dilemma and argue that one of these is likely to emerge through one-way communication. The experimental data support this notion. We find that the actions of both the sender and receiver of the message are crucially affected by the cheap talk stage and that efficiency in the volunteer’s dilemma increases with one-way communication.

This paper studies the effect of social relations on convergence to the efficient equilibrium in 2 × 2 coordination games from an experimental perspective. We employ a 2 × 2 factorial design in which we explore two different games with asymmetric payoffs and two matching protocols: “friends” versus “strangers”. In the first game, payoffs by the worse-off player are the same in the two equilibria, whereas in the second game, this player will receive lower payoffs in the efficient equilibrium. Surprisingly, the results show that “strangers” coordinate more frequently in the efficient equilibrium than “friends” in both games. Network measures such as in-degree, out-degree and betweenness are all positively correlated with playing the strategy which leads to the efficient outcome but clustering is not. In addition, ‘envy’ explains no convergence to the efficient outcome.