Experimental Tests of Nash Refinements

非合作博弈研究中的一个重大悬而未决的问题是对纳什均衡概念的适当提炼。“精炼”是一种具有均衡结果的理论，它是纳什结果集的一个适当的子集。已经提出了一系列相继的更强的精炼，其中许多都是由简单博弈的具体例子推动的，在这些简单博弈中，较弱的精炼允许平衡，而这些均衡被认为是不合理的。在这篇文献中，关于什么行为是明智的讨论，通常是基于作者关于“理性”的个人将如何玩游戏的主观观点。尽管博弈论有时被认为是关于理性代理人应该如何行为的规范性理论，但该理论被广泛应用于产业组织和其他经济学领域来分析具体问题，因此博弈论的积极(经验)内容也是相关的。此外，对直觉和非直觉均衡的讨论通常是在受市场应用启发的例子的背景下进行的。这个项目的贡献来自于使用精心设计的实验室实验来测试相互竞争的改进。在这些实验中，经济奖励被用来诱导玩家的偏好，从而使相互竞争的理论给出不同的预测。这些实验的结果将提供亟需的经验证据，证明这些改进中有哪些反复未能预测受控实验室实验的结果。

A major unresolved issue in the study of noncooperative games is the appropriate refinement of the Nash equilibrium concept. A "refinement" is a theory with equilibrium outcomes that are a proper subset of the set of Nash outcomes. A sequence of successively stronger refinements has been proposed, many of which are motivated by specific examples of simple games in which the weaker refinement permitted equilibria which were thought not to be sensible. In this literature, discussions about what behavior is sensible are typically based on the author's subjective opinion about how "rational" individuals would play the game. Even though game theory is sometimes said to be a normative theory about how rational agents ought to behave, the theory is widely applied in industrial organization and other areas of economics to analyze specific issues, so the positive (empirical) content of game theory is also relevant. In addition the discussions of intuitive and unintuitive equilibria are often in the context of examples that are inspired by market applications. The contribution of this project comes from using carefully designed laboratory experiments to test competing refinements. In these experiments financial rewards are used to induce players' preferences in a manner such that competing theories give distinct predictions. The results of the experiments will provide badly needed empirical evidence on which of these refinements repeatedly fail to predict the results of controlled laboratory experiments.