Equilibrium Selection under Limited Control - An Experiment on Network Hawk Dove Games

Equilibrium selection in networks is difficult. Players have to both choose their contacts and their actions. In this paper, we formally and experimentally analyze three variants of the game varying the strategy set of the players. We formally show, that limiting the strategy set can both increase and decrease the number of sub game perfect equilibria in the game. Human participants playing these games end up in similar equilibria even though they find it more difficult to reach them, the more equilibria exist.