Coordination in a skeptical two-group population

This paper explores a situation in which a population split into two groups
attempts to achieve the socially efficient outcome of a coordination game between
the groups. But, in addition to the coordination game, a second kind of interaction
takes place inside each group trying to fulfill internal social aims such as acceptance
or approval. To achieve these strategic and social concerns, a learning process comes
about inside each group. The accomplishment of the social concerns depends only
upon the popularity of the strategies inside each social group.We refer here to skeptical
individuals as those that do not feel so much coerced by social influence in relation
to social objectives. Our study reveals that a skeptical population can achieve coordination
between the two groups, but it can also evolve to other final states, namely,
anticoordination, dynamical coexistence of strategies and payoff inferior equilibrium.
We analyse the causes that give rise to these final states in thewhole range of initial distributions
of strategies. Our analysis discloses a highly nontrivial behaviour observed
in many real-life situations: We find that for high levels of skepticism a society can
coordinate in the socially efficient coordination outcome, which can not be obtained
for lower levels of skepticism. We also describe how such coordination is possible in
a risky environment. We provide numerical simulations that describe the complexity
of the different scenarios.