Schelling Coordination And Focal Points

Schelling's coordination experiments (e.g. two parachutists with the same map trying to meet, or two people splitting $100 in separate rooms) show that people are well practiced at thinking through how to converge with another person without communicating — reasoning recursively about what the other will do given what they think you will do — and converge on focal points like the bridge or a 50-50 split far more often than chance.