Adaptive Behavior and Cooperation in Experimental Coordination Games

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This project continues to study coordination problems in experimental games. It evaluates alternative theories of adaptive behavior by studying the times series of past experiments on coordination games and through the design of new games. It examines the ability of evolutionary stability and the genetic algorithm as well as individual learning models to explain the dynamics of play. The project also studies the foundations of cooperation which pervade much of the prior work on experimental coordination games. This research has made and will continue to make an important contribution to economics. Coordination games of the type studied in this project have been used to test theories about underemployment equilibria in macroeconoimcs. In industrial organization coordination problems occur in such areas of research as standardization, the entry of new firms into an oligopolistic industry, multi-agent incentive problems and network externalities. The controlled laboratory experiments in this project provide one of the only ways of testing the wide variety of selection and refinement criteria used by game theorists.