Social Focal Points

We use experimental methods to study coordination games analogous to voting games over fixed divisions of a pie. We find that players use the ethnic or gender identities of other players, rather than other payoff irrelevant features of a game’s description, to achieve coordination. Coordination along or across gender lines, we show, can be attributed in part to the presence of social norms rather than to the focal point properties of identity. Coordination along ethnic lines however is explained by focal point effects of ethnic categories and can not be accounted for either by the existence of other-regarding preferences between coethnics or to the existence of norms for cooperation within ethnic groups. This evidence suggests that the importance of identity in social interactions may can be explained without appealing to differential attitudinal characteristics of individuals or differences in norms across groups but more simply from the existence of categories that can be used by rational agents to structure