Equilibrium Play in Large Group Market Entry Games

Coordination behavior is studied experimentally in a class of noncooperative market entry games featuring symmetric players, complete information, zero entry costs, and several randomly presented values of the market capacity. Once the market capacity becomes publicly known, each player must decide privately whether to enter the market and receive a payoff, which increases linearly in the difference between the market capacity and the number of entrants, or stay out. Payoffs for staying out are either positive, giving rise to the domain of gains, or negative, giving rise to the domain of losses. The major findings are substantial individual differences that do not diminish with practice, aggregate behavior that is organized extremely well in both the domains of gains and losses by the Nash equilibrium solution, and variations in the population action strategies with repeated play of the stage game that are accounted for by a variant of an adaptive learning model due to Roth and Erev (1995).