Play Communication and the Consequences of Imitation

将信息获取和信息处理引入决策的经济模型，是经济学现实性和相关性的重大突破。信息经济学的范式几乎在经济研究的每一个领域都提供了新的见解。目前流行的一种模型将拥有私有信息的经济主体视为不完全信息博弈。这些模型已经渗透到经济学的大多数领域，属于信号、筛选、分类、逆向选择和机制设计的范畴。尽管在现实中对话和其他类型的通信明显盛行，但这些应用模型中很少允许代理相互交谈。这个项目的中心前提是，沟通应该以博弈论的方式明确地纳入经济模型。一些研究是在两个应用的背景下进行的。第一类是投票政治情境，其中演讲扮演着重要角色；其目的是使政治修辞的作用合理化。第二个应用是双边贸易，研究偏好为私人信息的交易者之间的沟通对资源配置的影响。以双重拍卖作为交易制度的原型。该项目还开发了一种研究有限理性的新方法。自省告诉我们，经济模型中假设的个人策略的知识、计算能力和复杂性超出了现实的信念。但理性选择模型并没有被替代模型所取代，因为理性选择模型表现良好，而替代模型是描述性的，总是会崩溃。在这个项目中开发的模型不同于以往的工作，因为它的界限是强加给个人的计算能力，而不是策略的复杂性。这个模型的关键假设是，一个有限理性的个人在面对目前无法为自己计算出最佳行动的情况时，会模仿他人。这两方面的研究都非常令人兴奋。初步研究表明，现有的讨价还价模型可能会因为忽略游戏前的交流而做出严重错误的预测。这个项目将纠正这些广泛使用的经济模型中的偏见。一个可处理的有限理性的形式理论的发展将是经济学的一个重大突破。这个新理论可以解释一些假设经济主体完全理性行为的模型的经验问题。

The introduction of information acquisition and information processing into economic models of decision making was a major breakthrough in the realism and the relevance of economics. The paradigm of information economics provided new insights in almost every area of economic research. One currently popular model treats economic agents with private information as games of incomplete information. Such models have penetrated most fields of economics, falling under the rubrics of signalling, screening, sorting, adverse selection, and mechanism design. Very few of these applied models allow agents to talk to each other, despite the obvious prevalence of conversation and other types of communication in reality. The central premise of this project is that communication should be explicitly incorporated in a game-theoretic way into economic models. Some of this research is in the context of two applications. The first consists of voting-political situations in which speechmaking plays an important role; the goal is to rationalize the role of political rhetoric. The second application is to bilateral trading, studying the effect of communication between traders whose preferences are private information on resource allocation. The double auction is taken as the prototype trading institution. The project also develops a novel approach to bounded rationality. Introspection tells us that the knowledge, computational powers, and complexity of the strategies assumed of individuals in economic models is beyond realistic belief. But rational choice models have not been displaced by alternatives because rational choice models perform well and the alternative models are descriptive and invariably break down. The model developed in this project differs from past work in that bounds are imposed on the individual's ability to compute, rather than on the complexity of the strategies. The key assumption of this model is that a boundedly rational individual confronted by circumstances for which he cannot, at the present time, calculate an optimal action for himself, will imitate others. Both of these lines of research are very exciting. Preliminary work shows that existing bargaining models can make seriously wrong predictions by ignoring pre-play communications. This project would correct the biases in these widely used economic models. The development of a tractable formal theory of bounded rationality would be a major breakthrough in economics. This new theory could explain some of the empirical problems with models that assume completely rational behavior by economic agents.