Schelling Points
Thomas Schelling asked people: “You have to meet someone in New York City tomorrow. You cannot communicate beforehand. Where and when do you go?” Most answered Grand Central Station at noon. Nothing in game theory predicts this — any location-time combination could be an equilibrium. But people coordinate by finding focal points that seem natural, obvious, or special.
Schelling called these “focal points” in The Strategy of Conflict (1960). Now they’re often called Schelling points. They explain how coordination happens without explicit agreement — through shared cultural knowledge, salient features, and mutual expectation.
The mechanism is expectation about expectation. You think others will expect Grand Central. They think you think that. The reasoning doesn’t establish that Grand Central is optimal — only that it’s what everyone expects others to expect. The focal point creates itself through the expectation that it’s the focal point.
Salience can come from many sources. Prominence: the famous landmark. Uniqueness: the only round number. Precedent: where we met last time. Convention: how others have solved similar problems. The focal point need not be efficient or rational — only shared.
Schelling points structure real coordination. When should you email a response? Within 24 hours feels right — not because it’s optimal but because it’s expected. What’s a “reasonable” price? Round numbers serve as anchors. Which side of the sidewalk should you walk on? Follow the local flow.
Legal defaults work this way. Contracts specify what happens when parties don’t specify. The defaults become focal points — parties often accept them without negotiation, not because they’re ideal but because departing from default requires justification. The default has salience by being default.
The concept has strategic implications. If you want coordination, create focal points. Make your preference salient, obvious, expected. If you want to block coordination, obscure focal points — create competing saliences, inject ambiguity, undermine shared expectations.
Schelling points are cultural phenomena dressed in game-theoretic language. What’s obvious in one culture isn’t in another. New Yorkers think Grand Central; Parisians might think the Eiffel Tower. The focal point depends on shared background that varies by group, place, and time.
Coordination requires common knowledge — not just knowledge but knowledge that everyone knows that everyone knows.
Go Deeper
Books
- The Strategy of Conflict by Thomas Schelling (1960) — The source. Game theory applied to real coordination problems. Nobel Prize-winning work.
- Micromotives and Macrobehavior by Thomas Schelling — How individual choices aggregate into collective patterns.
- Convention by David Lewis — Philosophical treatment of how conventions emerge and persist.
Essays
- Schelling’s 1958 paper “The Strategy of Conflict Prospectus for a Reorientation of Game Theory” in Journal of Conflict Resolution — Early formulation.
- The Grand Central Station coordination experiment is described in The Strategy of Conflict, Chapter 3.
Related: [[game-theory]], [[nash-equilibrium]], [[pattern-language]], [[tacit-knowledge]]