Game Harmony: A Behavioral Approach to Predicting Cooperation in Games

Abstract

Game harmony describes how harmonious (non-conflictual) or disharmonious (conflictual) the interests of players are in a game, as embodied in the game’s raw payoffs. It departs from the traditional game-theoretic approach in that it is a non-equilibrium behavioral approach which can be psychologically founded. We experimentally test the predictive power of basic game harmony measures on a variety of well-known 2×2 games and randomly-generated 2×2 and 3×3 generic games. Our findings support its all rounded predictive power. Game harmony provides an alternative tool that is both powerful and parsimonious, as it does not require information on a subject’s degree of rationality, social preferences, beliefs and perceptions.

Keywords: games, game harmony, cooperation, behavioral economics