Constrained interactions and social coordination

We consider a co-evolutionary model of social coordination and network formation where agents may decide on an action in a 2 × 2 coordination game and on whom to establish costly links to. We find that a payoff dominant convention is selected for a wider parameter range when agents may only support a limited number of links as compared to a scenario where agents are not constrained in their linking choice. The main reason behind this result is that under constrained interactions agents face a trade-off between the links they have and those they would rather have.