Decomposing coordination failure in stag hunt games

Many situations involve trading-off what is safe for the individual and what is beneficial for the group. This tension is extensively studied as the “Stag Hunt” coordination game. By combining a new theoretical approach with two experiments, this paper shows a disconnection between behavior in Stag Hunt games and the predictions of many models. Any Stag Hunt game can be uniquely decomposed into three payoff components: strategic, behavioral, and kernel. The behavioral component exists in every Stag Hunt game despite being largely ignored by previous models. Arbitrarily many Stag Hunt games exist where these models predict the same behavior. Despite the constant predictions, behavior in repeated and one-shot games systematically vary. The mechanism underlying these results is that all models of Stag Hunt behavior fail to properly account for the influence of the behavioral component.