Strategic Delay and Coordination Efficiency in Global Games

2026-04-06

AI Summary

This study investigates how individuals strategically delay decisions in global games to balance the trade-off between acquiring additional information and incurring discounted payoffs, thereby enhancing the efficiency of collective coordination. The authors develop a two-stage collective decision model in which agents, upon receiving noisy private signals about a common fundamental, choose either to act immediately or to wait. Late movers can observe the identities of early movers to refine their beliefs via Bayesian updating, but face a payoff discount if coordination succeeds. Integrating global game theory, Bayesian inference, and dynamic decision analysis, the paper demonstrates that strategic delay—through an intertemporal trade-off between information gains and payoff losses—significantly improves both the efficiency and robustness of coordination equilibria, particularly under specific parameter conditions.

Abstract

We investigate a coordination model for a two-stage collective decision-making problem within the framework of global games. The agents observe noisy signals of a shared random variable, referred to as the fundamental, which determines the underlying payoff. Based on these signals, the agents decide whether to participate in a collective action now or to delay. An agent who delays acquires additional information by observing the identities of agents who have chosen to participate in the first stage. This informational advantage, however, comes at the cost of a discounted payoff if coordination ultimately succeeds. Within this decision-making framework, we analyze how the option to delay can enhance collective outcomes. We show that this intertemporal trade-off between information acquisition and payoff reduction can improve coordination and increase the efficiency of collective decision-making.

Problem

• strategic delay
• coordination efficiency
• global games
• collective decision-making
• information acquisition

Innovation

• strategic delay
• global games
• coordination efficiency
• information acquisition
• collective decision-making