Abstract
The issue of path-dependency in organizational learning is explored by analysing human behaviors in an artificial context in which many agents must cooperate to achieve a common goal without being allowed to use verbal communication. The artificial context is based on Target The Two, a game created by M. Cohen and P. Bacdayan to explore in laboratory the emergence of rules of coordination and the routinization of behaviors. The game admits a large number of different starting configurations. Some of them can be more easily solved by adopting one (locally optimal) strategy, while others can be easily solved by a different, locally optimal, strategy. Two groups of players were asked to play a tournament. During the first part of the tournament (the training phase) every group was exposed to a set of starting configurations, which could be easily played using one strategy only. After the training phase both groups were exposed to the same sequence of starting configurations. We observed the emergence of a persistent differentiation in players' behavior. The group of players exposed to a set of configurations which led to easier learning of one strategy continued to use it more frequently in the second part of the tournament, and symmetric behavior arose in the other group. Moreover in both groups there emerged a subset of players with strongly routinized behaviors, i.e. groups of players which, after the training phase, used the learned strategy for all runs of the tournament: they adopted a strategy once and for all and insisted on using it even when the configurations could not be efficiently played with the strategy adopted. These results are used to define precisely and to test experimentally the degree of routinization in players' behaviors, the existence of ‘cognitive traps’ in the learning process, and the sub-optimality of routinized behaviors. The paper ends with a brief exploration of the implications for both the cognitive microfoundations and the institutional aspects of the theory of the firm and organization.