Imitation and the role of information in overcoming coordination failures

•We consider minimum effort games played on a network.•We consider a family of behavioral rules including different imitation rules.•Without spillovers, inefficient conventions arise independently of the network.•With spillovers, convergence to the efficient convention can obtain.•We identify a condition on the network which characterizes efficiency.

We consider minimum-effort games played in an arbitrary network. For a family of imitation behavioral rules, including Imitate the Best and the Proportional Imitation Rule, we show that inefficient conventions arise independently of the interaction structure, if information is limited to the interaction neighborhoods. In the presence of information spillovers, we provide a condition on the network structure that guarantees the emergence of efficient conventions. In contrast, if this condition is violated we will observe inefficient conventions, even in the presence of information spillovers.