Abstract

When people coordinate in one-shot, pure coordination games they rely on existing concepts of salience. In an experiment with pure coordination games, concepts of salience emerged when players were given a set of different but related coordination problems with randomly generated labels. The same players were also given a set of different but related coordination problems with culture-laden labels and common features between labels across problems. The players could develop concepts of salience in the first set of games and appeared to use common features as rules for coordination in the second set. The paper also finds evidence of pair-specific learning and coordination on favourite labels.