Jump-starting coordination in a stag hunt: Motivation, mechanisms, and their analysis

TL;DR

This paper explores mechanisms to promote cooperation in stag hunt games, analyzing how to avoid coordination failures and encourage the selection of the cooperative equilibrium using game-theoretic methods.

Contribution

It introduces and analyzes mechanisms based on game theory to prevent coordination failures and promote cooperation in stag hunt scenarios.

Findings

Mechanisms can effectively increase the likelihood of cooperative equilibrium.

Incremental deployability is crucial for understanding sink equilibria.

Game-theoretic analysis provides insights into coordination problem solutions.

Abstract

The stag hunt (or assurance game) is a simple game that has been used as a prototype of a variety of social coordination problems (ranging from the social contract to the adoption of technical standards). Players have the option to either use a superior cooperative strategy whose payoff depends on the other players' choices or use an inferior strategy whose payoff is independent of what other players do; the cooperative strategy may incur a loss if sufficiently many other players do not cooperate. Stag hunts have two (strict) pure Nash equilibria, namely, universal cooperation and universal defection (as well as a mixed equilibrium of low predictive value). Selection of the inferior (pure) equilibrium is called a coordination failure. In this paper, we present and analyze using game-theoretic techniques mechanisms aiming to avert coordination failures and incite instead selection of the superior equilibrium. Our analysis is based on the solution concepts of Nash equilibrium, dominance solvability, as well as a formalization of the notion of "incremental deployability," which is shown to be keenly relevant to the sink equilibrium.