City Research Online

Abstract

We study games with natural‐language labels (i.e., strategic problems where options are denoted by words), for which we propose and test a measurable characterization of prominence. We assume that—ceteris paribus—players find particularly prominent those strategies that are denoted by words more frequently used in their everyday language. To operationalize this assumption, we suggest that the prominence of a strategy‐label is correlated with its frequency of occurrence in large text corpora, such as the Google Books corpus (“n‐gram” frequency). In testing for the strategic use of word frequency, we consider experimental games with different incentive structures (such as incentivestoandnot tocoordinate), as well as subjects from different cultural/linguistic backgrounds. Our data show that frequently‐mentioned labels are more (less) likely to be selected when there are incentives to match (mismatch) others. Furthermore, varying one's knowledge of the others' country of residence significantly affects one's reliance on word frequency. Overall, the data show that individuals play strategies that fulfill our characterization of prominence in a (boundedly) rational manner.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Copyright © 2021 The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
Publisher Keywords:	Focal points, salience, coordination, hide-and-seek, culture, language, C72, C91
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
Departments:	School of Policy & Global Affairs School of Policy & Global Affairs > Economics
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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