Epistemic Foundations of Salience-Based Coordination

Abstract

This paper aims to assess current theoretical findings on the origin of coordination by salience and suggests a way to clarify the existing framework. The main concern is to reveal how different coordination mechanisms rely on specific epistemic aspects of reasoning. The paper highlights the fact that basic epistemic assumptions of theories diverge in a way that makes them essentially distinctive. Consequently, recommendations and predictions of the traditional views of coordination by salience are, in principle, based on the processes related to the agent’s presumptions regarding the cognitive abilities of a co-player. This finding implies that we should consider these theories as complementary, and not competitive, explanations of the same phenomenon.