Rational coordination with no communication or conventions

Abstract

We study pure coordination games where in every outcome, all players have identical payoffs, 'win' or 'lose'. We identify and discuss a range of 'purely rational principles' guiding the reasoning of rational players in such games and analyze which classes of coordination games can be solved by such players with no preplay communication or conventions. We observe that it is highly nontrivial to delineate a boundary between purely rational principles and other decision methods, such as conventions, for solving such coordination games.