Global information and mobility support coordination among humans.

Area of Science:

• Behavioral economics
• Social dynamics
• Agent-based modeling

Background:

• Coordination failures pose significant individual and societal problems.
• The influence of individual mobility on coordination dynamics remains poorly understood.
• Understanding these dynamics is crucial for effective policy interventions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To experimentally investigate human behavior in a spatial coordination game with costly convention changes.
• To analyze how mobility and information influence convention adoption and clustering.
• To develop and validate a simulation model based on observed heuristics.

Main Methods:

• Conducting a spatial pure coordination game experiment with human participants.
• Implementing mobility within a spatial environment where participants can change conventions.
• Introducing global information (number of individuals per convention) as an experimental manipulation.
• Developing a computational model to simulate observed behaviors and heuristics.

Main Results:

• Participants formed distinct, homogeneous clusters based on convention.
• Each convention was adopted by approximately half of the individuals in the absence of global information.
• Providing global information led to consensus in most, but not all, experimental runs.
• A simulation model accurately replicated experimental findings, revealing underlying heuristics.

Conclusions:

• Individual mobility, while leading to clustered conventions, does not inherently prevent coordination.
• Global information significantly enhances the likelihood of achieving societal consensus.
• The study provides a validated model and actionable insights for policymakers aiming to influence behavior in mobile populations.