A Notion of Prominence for Games with Natural-Language Labels

Alessandro Sontuoso and Sudeep Bhatia

No 9, PPE Working Papers from Philosophy, Politics and Economics, University of Pennsylvania

Abstract: We study games with natural-language labels (i.e., strategic problems where options are denoted by words), for which we propose and test a measurable characterization of prominence. We assume that – ceteris paribus – players find particularly prominent those strategies that are denoted by labels frequently used in everyday language: to operationalize this assumption, we suggest that the prominence of a strategy-label is correlated with its frequency of occurrence in large text corpora. In order to test for the strategic use of word frequency, we consider experimental games with different incentive structures (such as incentives to and not to coordinate), as well as subjects from different cultural/linguistic backgrounds. We find that frequently-mentioned labels are more (less) likely to be selected when there are incentives to match (mismatch) others. Furthermore, varying one’s knowledge of the others’ cultural background significantly affects one’s reliance on word frequency. Overall, our studies suggest that individuals select strategies that fulfill our characterization of prominence in a (boundedly) rational manner.

Keywords: focal points; salience; coordination; hide-and-seek; level-k (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 47 pages
Date: 2017-05, Revised 2018-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-exp, nep-gth and nep-hpe
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https://www.sas.upenn.edu/ppe-repec/ppc/wpaper/0009.pdf First version, 2017 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: A notion of prominence for games with natural‐language labels (2021)
Working Paper: A Notion of Prominence for Games with Natural-Language Labels (2020)
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