Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Humans often coordinate their actions in order to reach a mu-tually advantageous state. These circumstances are chieflymodeled by coordination games, a well-known class of gamesextensively studied in behavioral economics. In this work,we present the first resource-rational mechanistic approachto coordination games, showing that a variant of norma-tive expected-utility maximization acknowledging cognitivelimitations can account for several major experimental find-ings on human coordination behavior in strategic settings.Concretely, we show that Nobandegani et al.’s (2018) ratio-nal process model, sample-based expected utility, providesa unified account of (1) the effect of time pressure on hu-man coordination, and (2) how systematic variations of risk-vs. payoff-dominance affect coordination behavior. Impor-tantly, Harsanyi and Selten’s (1988) theory of equilibrium se-lection fails to account for (1-2). As such, our work suggeststhat the optimal use of limited cognitive resources may lie atthe core of human coordination behavior. We conclude by dis-cussing the implication of our work for understanding humanstrategic behavior, moral decision-making, and human ratio-nality.