In a coordination game with incomplete information where a positive payoff of individual
investment requires a sufficiently large fraction of agents to invest (or an attacked status quo to
be abandoned), does the option to delay facilitate coordination? In this paper, delaying agents
observe a binary signal depending on whether the fraction of non-delaying agents surpasses
a threshold. The answer to the question depends on the discount rate and on the observation
threshold. If the discount rate (or the period length) is small, there is less coordination (or the
status quo is more stable) than in the static one-period case. Successful coordination is partic-
ularly less likely when the observation is the same as the fall of the status quo. The result is
reversed when the discount rate is large, or the observation threshold is small. In this case,
however, when the heterogeneity of the agents (i.e. the variance of their private information)
is sufficiently small, the unique equilibrium in monotone strategies is unstable. This property
is indicative of the difficulty that agents may have in coordinating actions with strategic com-
plementarities in a multi-period context. The model is analyzed in a two-period framework,
which is extended to multiple periods. We discuss implications for macroeconomics, finance
and political stability