Coordination Dynamics in Technology Adoption: Lessons From an Evolutionary Game Theoretical Analysis

1. Introduction

One of the major social challenges in many societies is getting people to act in a communal manner while yet pursuing their own interests (Pletzer et al., 2018; Pitt et al., 2012). It is frequently compromised by individual’s self-interest, from coordinating employees at work to preserving cooperative relationships between nations. Many academic fields, including evolutionary biology, economics, physics, and computer science, have shown a significant deal of interest in the study of the mechanisms that underlie the emergence of such collective behaviours (Whiten et al., 2022; Bak-Coleman et al., 2021; Han, 2013). In our everyday life, there is often the need to engage in interactions which requires us to coordinate our behaviour with others. This implies that we may have to consider the actions of others in an interactive situation before deciding on our own actions in order to reach a successful outcome. Achieving a joint venture among individuals with their own self-interest is a significant social and economic challenge in various societies (Barrett, 2016; Hardin, 1968; Ostrom, 1990a; Pitt et al., 2012; Sigmund, 2010). Several mechanisms that can promote the emergence and stability of collective behaviours among such individuals, have been proposed. They include kin and group selection, direct and indirect reciprocities, spatial networks, reward and punishment (Nowak, 2006b).

Lately, the ability to form and adhere to prior agreements (Nesse, 2001b; Frank, 1988; Han et al., 2017, 2015a) has been proposed as an evolutionarily viable strategy inducing cooperative behaviour in the context of cooperation dilemmas; namely, the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) (Han et al., 2013a) and the Public Goods Game (PGG) (Han et al., 2017). It offers an alternative to various sorts of rewards to encourage good behaviour and punishment for poor behaviour. (Martinez-Vaquero et al., 2015; Sasaki et al., 2015a; Powers et al., 2012). These works have solely focused on the roles of commitments for enhancing mutual cooperation among self-interested individuals. However, commitments can be adopted as a tool for enhancing other types of collective behaviour such as coordination (Nesse, 2001b; Ostrom, 1990a; Barrett, 2016). In the context of cooperation dilemma games such as the PD and PGG (Nowak, 2006b), mutual cooperation is the only desirable collective outcome to which all parties are required to commit if an agreement is to be arranged. In contrast, in a coordination problem, there might be multiple optimal or desirable collective outcomes and players might have distinct, incompatible preferences regarding which outcome a mutual agreement should aim to achieve (e.g. due to asymmetric payoffs). Here in our work, we considered the evolutionary dynamics of technology adoption and the mechanisms that can improve coordination amongst technology investors.