Coordination in a skeptical two-group population

Abstract

This paper explores a situation in which a population split into two groups attempts to achieve the socially efficient outcome of a coordination game between the groups. But, in addition to the coordination game, a second kind of interaction takes place inside each group trying to fulfill internal social aims such as acceptance or approval. To achieve these strategic and social concerns, a learning process comes about inside each group. The accomplishment of the social concerns depends only upon the popularity of the strategies inside each social group. We refer here to skeptical individuals as those that do not feel so much coerced by social influence in relation to social objectives. Our study reveals that a skeptical population can achieve coordination between the two groups, but it can also evolve to other final states, namely, anticoordination, dynamical coexistence of strategies and payoff inferior equilibrium. We analyse the causes that give rise to these final states in the whole range of initial distributions of strategies. Our analysis discloses a highly nontrivial behaviour observed in many real-life situations: We find that for high levels of skepticism a society can coordinate in the socially efficient coordination outcome, which can not be obtained for lower levels of skepticism. We also describe how such coordination is possible in a risky environment. We provide numerical simulations that describe the complexity of the different scenarios.