A convention is a predisposition for participants in a joint activity to expect certain points of coordination to develop during the course of the activity. Convention is measured by the reduction in the amount of work needed by participants in a joint activity to achieve common goals. The example domain is a group of actors who are part of a moving company. Their job is to move boxes and furniture from a house into a truck. With practice, individuals within the community begin to converge on a set of conventionalized behaviors that best match the regularly occurring problems of coordination in the domain of activity.
Individual actors reason pragmatically about their shared tasks.
A home task environment develops for the individual actor as she becomes more familiar with behaviors of her co-participants. One important feature of the model is that the community improves its performance despite the fact that individual actors reason independently about their experiences. An analysis of a large set of experiments shows that the development of convention has several important properties. New conventions for coordinating joint activities develop as a result of practice. A group of individuals with varying experiences can converge on a pattern of cooperation for problems of coordination recur.