The Sealed-Bid Mechanism & Bargaining Under Incomplete Information

激励本研究的问题是如何在不完全信息下合理构建议价机制。在所谓的“转移价格问题”的背景下，自然会出现这样的问题，即设计从公司的一个部门转移到另一个部门的商品和服务的定价机制的问题。这种情况的一个典型特征是参与者并不清楚相关数据，例如供应商部门的成本和客户部门的收益。例如，供方比顾客更了解供方的成本，顾客比供方更了解顾客的利益，这是很正常的。这一研究项目继续并扩大了两位调查人员以前就密封投标议价机制开展的工作。不完全信息条件下，密封投标具有简单的线性均衡和理想的福利性质，是一种被广泛应用的构建议价的方法。不幸的是，还有无数其他的均衡，其福利属性从次优到零不等。作为一个实际问题，这种机制并不是很吸引人，因为不能保证“好的”均衡会从存在的无限均衡中被挑选出来。调查人员对密封投标机制进行了第一次实验室控制实验。他们证明，在密封出价机制下讨价还价的买家和卖家平均会选择导致“好”均衡的简单线性竞标策略。这个项目致力于解决这些实验中提出的一些尚未解决的重要问题。例如，随着实验范围的扩大，究竟是什么导致了阶梯函数式竞价行为的出现？我们如何解释这些实验中买卖双方的不对称行为呢？为什么非结构化的面对面谈判比所有其他形式的谈判表现得更好？“廉价谈话”，即对最终谈判没有任何约束力的谈话，会影响谈判过程的结果吗？该项目为我们理解议价行为做出了重要的方法论和实质性贡献。在方法上，它证明了常用的实验实践，如识别买家和卖家或重复实验少量次是否会对议价实验的结果产生偏差。实质上，它严格推导和实验检验了不完全信息条件下投标行为是否存在规律性或“规律”。

The problem motivating this research is one of how to properly structure bargaining under incomplete information. Such a problem arises naturally in the context of the so-called "transfer price problem," i.e., the problem of designing mechanisms for the pricing of goods and services that are transferred from one division of a firm to another. A typical feature of this situation is that the relevant data, e.g., the costs of the supplier division and the benefits of the customer division, are not well known to the participants. For example, it would be normal for the supplier's costs to be better known to the supplier than the customer, and for the customer's benefits to be better known to the customer than the supplier. This research project continues and extends work undertaken previously by the two investigators on sealed-bid mechanisms for bargaining. The sealed-bid procedure is one widely used method for structuring bargaining under incomplete information because it has a simple linear equilibrium with desirable welfare properties. Unfortunately, there are an infinite number of other equilibria with welfare properties that range from second-best optimal to zero. As a practical matter, this mechanism is not very appealing, since there is no guarantee that the "good" equilibrium will be picked out of the infinity of other equilibria that exist. The investigators conducted the first controlled laboratory experiments on the sealed-bid mechanism. They demonstrated that buyers and sellers bargaining under a sealed-bid mechanism on average chose the simple, linear bidding strategies that resulted in "good" equilibria. This project pursues a number of important unresolved questions raised by these experiments. For instance, what exactly account for the emergence of step-function-like bidding behavior as the horizon of the experiment increases? How can we account for the asymmetrical behavior of the buyers and sellers in these experiments? Why did unstructured face-to-face bargaining perform better than all other forms of bargaining? Does "cheap talk," i.e., talk that does not have any binding impact on the eventual negotiations, influence the outcome of the process? The project makes significant methodological and substantive contributions to our understanding of bargaining behavior. Methodologically, it demonstrates whether commonly used experimental practices such as identifying buyers and sellers or repeating the experiment a small number of times bias the results of bargaining experiments. Substantively, it derives rigorously and tests experimentally for the presence of regularities or "laws" in bidding behavior under incomplete information.