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Rational Coordination with no Communication or Conventions

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Logic, Rationality, and Interaction (LORI 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 10455))

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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 analyse 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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Note that, unlike the common use of ‘preplay communication’ in game theory to mean communication before the given game is played, here we mean communication before the players are even presented with the game.

  2. 2.

    Schelling shares this view on pure coordination games (see [17], p. 283, footnote 16).

  3. 3.

    In fact, the initial motivation for the present work came from concerns with the semantics of Alternating time temporal logic ATL, extending Coalition Logic.

  4. 4.

    This example is based on the children’s book When the Robbers Came to Cardamom Town by Thorbjørn Egner, featuring the characters Casper, Jesper and Jonathan.

  5. 5.

    In pictures these lines can be drawn in different styles or colours, to tell them apart.

  6. 6.

    Isomorphism is defined as usual for relational structures (see, e.g., [4]).

  7. 7.

    Recall, that a choice a is strictly dominated by a choice b if the choice b guarantees a strictly higher payoff than the choice a in every play of the game (see e.g. [12, 16]).

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Acknowledgements

The work of Valentin Goranko was partly supported by a research grant 2015-04388 of the Swedish Research Council. The work of Antti Kuusisto was supported by the ERC grant 647289 “CODA.” We thank the reviewers of this paper, as well as those of the Strategic Reasoning 2017 abstract for valuable remarks.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

    Valentin Goranko

  2. Visiting professor, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa

    Valentin Goranko

  3. University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Antti Kuusisto

  4. University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland

    Raine Rönnholm

Authors
  1. Valentin Goranko
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  2. Antti Kuusisto
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  3. Raine Rönnholm
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Valentin Goranko .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam , Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, The Netherlands

    Alexandru Baltag

  2. Department of Philosophy, The University of Auckland, Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Jeremy Seligman

  3. Graduate School of Letters, Hokkaido University , Sapporo, Japan

    Tomoyuki Yamada

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Goranko, V., Kuusisto, A., Rönnholm, R. (2017). Rational Coordination with no Communication or Conventions. In: Baltag, A., Seligman, J., Yamada, T. (eds) Logic, Rationality, and Interaction. LORI 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10455. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-55665-8_3

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