Anti-coordination and social interactions

This paper studies the first model of social interactions with anti-coordination. Agents have fixed partners with whom they play a common bilateral game of anti-coordination, like the chicken game. Partnerships are represented as links of a network. The paper asks: How do social interactions interplay with the incentives to anti-coordinate? How does the social network affect individual choices in equilibrium? The analysis shows that network effects are much stronger than when partners play a coordination game. The network notably affects how agents respond when a strategy becomes more advantageous. In the standard benchmark of complete interactions, more agents play the strategy. This result does not generally hold when the network is incomplete. On bipartite networks, agents’ choices are unaffected, while on core-periphery networks, less agents may play the strategy. © 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. JEL classification: C72; Z13