The limitations of the positional order effect: Can it support silent threats and non-equilibrium behavior?

Common knowledge about the chronological order of play in extensive form games has been shown in several. studies to change the behavior of the players by conferring an advantage to the first mover. To study the validity and limitations of this positional order effect, we study sequential battle-of-sexes games where it predicts an unannounced commitment to a weakly dominated strategy, and a class of 2 x 2 games with unique equilibria where it even predicts non-equilibrium behavior. We observe that the effect weakens considerably in the former and vanishes completely in the latter. Thus, the study provides evidence about the importance of physical temporal ordering for real life economic decisions. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.