Game-Theoretic, Evolutionary, and Adaptive Approaches to Coordination

该项目旨在了解协调问题是如何解决的。它使用互补的博弈论、进化和适应技术来研究协调的历史模型。大部分研究致力于详细分析反复玩协调博弈并根据自己的经验以看似合理但不一定理性的方式调整策略的人群的策略选择动态。该项目专注于具有进化博弈结构的模型，以及具体、简单的协调博弈，选择这些模型既是为了它们的经济利益，也是为了获得实验证据。进化方法在协调研究中具有重要的比较优势，为自适应模型的研究提供了良好的基础。这项研究的最终目标是了解团队规模、玩家的收益对彼此决策的敏感度，以及玩家交流的机会如何决定他们如何协调决策。协调问题是经济学中许多重要问题的核心。这些问题包括最优激励方案的设计；长期关系中哪些结果可以得到隐性合同的支持；以及确定讨价还价者是否以及如何分享达成协议的盈余。这个项目对协调问题的分析工具和见解对这一领域的研究做出了宝贵的贡献。这一贡献包括新的理论，这些理论比标准技术对协调游戏中的行为提供了更令人信服的描述。例如，协调实验表明，存在一些传统博弈论无法解释的行为规律，但可以用本项目开发的模型类型来解释。

This project is directed at understanding how coordination problems are solved. It uses complementary game-theoretic, evolutionary, and adaptive techniques to study historical models of coordination. Most of the research is devoted to a detailed analysis of the dynamics of strategy choices in populations repeatedly playing coordination games and adjusting their strategies in response to their experience in plausible, but not necessarily rational ways. The project focuses on models with the structure of evolutionary games, and on specific, simple coordination games, chosen both for their economic interest and for the availability of experimental evidence. The evolutionary approach has important comparative advantages in studying coordination, and provides a good foundation for adaptive models. The ultimate goal of this research is to understand how group size, the sensitivity of players' payoffs to each other's decisions, and player's opportunities to communicate interact to determine how well they coordinate their decisions. Coordination problems lie at the heart of many important questions in economics. These include the design of optimal incentive schemes; the characterization of which outcomes can be supported by implicit contract in a long-term relationship; and the determination of whether, and how, bargainers share the surplus from making an agreement. The analytic tools and insights into coordination problems from this project make a valuable contribution to this area of research. The contribution consists of new theories that provide more convincing characterizations of behavior in coordination games than standard techniques. For example, coordination experiments show that there are behavioral regularities that can not be explained by orthodox game theory but can be explained by the type of models developed in this project.