The problem of social coordination is widespread across species and contexts, ranging from group cohesion and movement to courtship, aggression, and cooperation (see chapters on “Pro-social Behavior,” “Group-Spacing and Coordination,” and cooperation for more information on these topics). The primary similarity across these topics, uniting them under the umbrella term “coordination,” is that the outcome is due to joint action by two or more individuals at the same time that results in a desired outcome. Coordination is often used more or less interchangeably with cooperation in biology; however in economics, coordination specifically focuses on how individuals synchronize their behavior to reach (or not) a common goal (Guastello and Guastello 1998). It is often studied using coordination games, in which subjects benefit by coordinating their responses on the same outcome. These games are part of a set of tasks used in experimental economics to explore decision-making outcomes in...
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Smith, M.F., Brosnan, S.F. (2019). Coordination Games. In: Vonk, J., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_1376-1
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