Coordination problems arise in many economic, political, and social situations. Many times, authorities and institutions are created to solve these coordination problems. However, the success of these institutions depends on whether people are willing to follow their prescriptions. Using a behavioral experiment on Amazon Mechanical Turk we analyze whether an authority can aid in solving hawk-dove coordination games and whether its success depends on a shared identity by the players. The authority is represented in our experiment by a randomizing device that recommends actions to players to implement a socially efficient correlated equilibrium. In the game, players are better off following the recommendations if they believe others will do as well. We investigate whether people are more likely to follow recommendations when they have a shared identity. We find that the device's success is not driven by group membership, but rather by the content of its recommendations.

In the existing literature, panic-based bank runs are triggered by a commonly acknowledged and observed sunspot signal. There are only two equilibrium realizations resulting from the commonly observed sunspot signal: Everyone runs or no one runs. I consider a more general and more realistic situation in which consumers observe noisy private sunspot signals. If the noise in the signals is sufficiently small, there exists a proper correlated equilibrium for some demand deposit contracts. A full bank run, a partial bank run (in which some consumers panic whereas others do not), or no bank run occurs, depending on the realization of the sunspot signals. If the probabilities of runs are small, the optimal demand deposit contract tolerates full and partial bank runs.