These aren’t necessarily the first answers to spring to mind, but upon reflection they are the best options when trying to match a partner. Test subjects received a questionnaire with items like “name a year” or “name a city in England.” When they were merely asked to think of the first answer that came to their minds, many provided their birth year or home town.īut when they had incentive to coordinate – they were told they would be paid if they managed to answer the question the same way as an anonymous partner – most chose 1990 (the year at the time) and London (the largest city in the UK). The stakes are low - only a few dollars - but these experiments can tell us how powerful focal points really are.Īn earlier study cowritten by Robert Sugden, one of the authors of the current study, illustrated that people actually have an understanding of what it takes to coordinate, rather than just picking the most salient or obvious answer. In a 2014 study appearing in the American Economic Review, authors Andrea Isoni, Anders Poulsen, Robert Sugden, and Kei Tsutsui, have test subjects play bargaining games with and without focal points to see if they can skew negotiations in a controlled environment. But Schelling’s career was consumed with weightier considerations, like negotiations between countries on the brink of thermonuclear war.Ĭould a focal point, a Grand Central Station-like landmark within the bounds of a tense international negotiation, help two mistrustful superpowers avoid mutually assured destruction?
The existence of focal points is mildly reassuring if you’re trying to meet up with a friend and lose your phone or get separated from your companion in a crowded place. Even the classic Schelling focal point of Grand Central might not apply if you asked different groups of New Yorkers who lived in different parts of the city or never took the trains that pass through the station. Schelling himself said trying to determine the focal point of a game analytically is like trying to use a computer to understand whether a joke will be funny – it depends on cultural context and the relationship of the people trying to coordinate. Schelling argued that people’s apparent ability to coordinate without communicating was key to understanding how real-life strategic games are solved. Schelling argued that people’s apparent ability to coordinate without communicating was key to understanding how real-life strategic games are solved.Īs game theory has developed in the decades since, Schelling’s ideas about focal points have been rarely studied, partly because the existence of focal points was perceived more as a mysterious, sociological phenomenon rather than an economic one amenable to analysis. He introduced this concept in his 1960 book The Strategy of Conflict as a “focal point” – a solution to a coordination problem that somehow stands out as the natural answer even if the participants don’t have a chance to arrange it beforehand. Thomas Schelling, the Nobel-winning game theorist who passed away earlier this month, found in an informal survey that many of his students tended toward the same answer when posed this question about New York City: they would wait under the clock in Grand Central Station at 12 noon, hoping their partners had the same idea. Do you think you could still manage to show up at the same place and time?
The only problem is that neither of you can communicate in advance about when or where to meet. Let’s say you know you have to meet a stranger in your city sometime tomorrow. A survey during the 1950s found that this was a natural meeting point for people trying to connect in New York City.
The clock at the information booth at Grand Central Terminal.
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