Threat to regulate and coordination failures: Experimental evidence

Coordination games can represent a wide range of issues in real estate. In this paper, we present the results of an experiment designed to investigate the impact of regulatory threats in a coordination game. The experiment consisted of two sessions. The first session included a simple coordination game. We found significant coordination failures among the players in this session. We then conducted a second session in which we introduced a new player who had the choice to either intervene and regulate the payoffs of the other players or not to intervene and let the other players' actions determine the outcome. Our objective was to test whether the introduction of such a regulatory authority would induce more cooperative play by the players and move the market to the Pareto superior outcome. We found this not to be the case. There was no statistically significant difference between the choices of subjects in the two sessions.