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Behavioural economics

Occasional errors can benefit coordination

Nature volume 545, pages 297–298 (2017)Cite this article

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The chances of solving a problem that involves coordination between people are increased by introducing robotic players that sometimes make mistakes. This finding has implications for real-world coordination problems. See Letter p.370

Complex human societies exist because people cooperate with each other and coordinate their activities1. Cooperation involves collaborating for common benefit, whereas coordination requires people to match their collaborative activities in appropriate ways. This often entails solving small, local coordination problems to achieve global coordination. As an example, consider the production of complex goods, which involves coordinating the division of labour across sites. In this instance, error-prone people must solve many, often intricate, local problems such as work processes, or the logistics of production and supply chains, to achieve global coordination. On page 370, Shirado and Christakis2 use network experiments to highlight the ways in which errors can help to improve global coordination.

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Figure 1: Noise helps to resolve coordination problems.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. the Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK

    Simon Gächter

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  1. Simon Gächter
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Correspondence to Simon Gächter.

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Gächter, S. Occasional errors can benefit coordination. Nature 545, 297–298 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/545297a

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