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Fabio Tufano (Milan Bicocca University)

The Power of Social Relations for Coordination: The Magic of ‘Oneness’

Understanding the determinants of coordination success is an important issue in economics. We report the results of experiments investi-gating the influence of social relations in a coordination game with Pareto-ranked equilibria. A novel feature of our setup is the use of a technique for measuring ‘oneness’. This construct, and tools for measuring it, have been developed in psychology where an established literature identifies oneness as a useful way of measuring the ‘closeness’ of relationships that exist between pairs of individuals. We adapt the measure to impute oneness indices to groups of individuals who also play a repeated weak-link game, where coordination failure is endemic. Our results are striking. Despite no possibilities for communication, groups with high oneness are very likely to coordinate on highly Pareto-ranked equilibria while groups with low oneness never do; hence, sufficiently high oneness appears a necessary condition for coordination success. While oneness co-varies, as expected, with various objective characteristics of groups, surprisingly, and perhaps somewhat magically, in the presence of oneness no other factors are ever significant.