A Notion of Prominence for Strategic Games

Identifying the best course of action in games with multiple equilibria is a longstanding unresolved issue in strategic interaction. The concept of prominence as a criterion for equilibrium selection has been suggested, but has remained for the most part an informal notion, without a psychologically grounded characterization. In this paper we propose one such characterization: by drawing on existing theories of human memory, language, and decision making we define prominence in terms of frequency of exposure. In particular, we consider games where strategies are denoted by natural language labels, and we measure the prominence of each strategy by how often its label occurs in natural language corpora. Our specification of prominence yields sharp quantitative predictions about behavior in coordination and discoordination problems. Here we present three studies designed to test such predictions, and show that individuals do select strategies that fulfill our definition of prominence and they furthermore do so in a (boundedly) rational manner.