Partial bandwagon effects and local interactions

We consider partial bandwagon properties in the context of coordination games to capture the idea of weak network externalities. We then study a local interactions model where agents play a coordination game following a noisy best-reply process. We show that globally pairwise risk dominant strategies are selected in arbitrary 3 x 3 coordination games, but not necessarily in larger games. A comparison with the global interactions benchmark shows that the nature of interactions might alter the long-run results themselves, and not only the speed of convergence. We also illustrate that the simultaneous coexistence of conventions is possible for games with at least 5 strategies. (C) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.