Doctoral Dissertation Research: An Experimental Analysis of Adpative Learning

人们是如何玩游戏的？更正式地说，人们如何在战略形势下做出决策？这是一个几十年来一直困扰博弈论者的问题。他们是使用博弈论者使用的分析技术，还是使用其他方法？来自过去20年进行的实验的证据表明，在许多情况下，人们不会像博弈论者那样进行分析。在过去的五年里，已经有许多研究试图确定实验对象使用的决策行为是否可以用几个简单的学习启发式和算法来描述。目前的研究首先发现了这些研究中用于确定球员类型的方法中的一个反复出现的问题，然后提出了一个替代的实验设计来消除这个问题。这项研究是我的论文的基础，来自该基金的资金将用于执行该工作的实验部分。以前研究的基本问题是，他们使用的计量经济学和统计学方法无法区分学习规则。根据玩家做出决定所依据的信息类型，这两类基本的学习规则是不同的：他们自己的收益历史或对手过去的比赛。包含在同一类中的规则在使用此信息的特定数量和方式上有所不同。以前的研究只观察了实验中的策略选择，然后试图使用计量经济学测试来同时确定受试者使用了哪种类型的信息以及他们是如何使用这些信息的。一项基于模拟的研究表明，这些计量经济学测试无法在这两项任务中取得成功。基于这些方法失败的原因，拟议的研究在实验中加入了一个额外的组成部分，旨在监控受试者对信息的使用。这是为了让实验者确定受试者正在使用哪种类型的信息，以帮助对他们的学习或决策行为建模的过程。结果应该是一种更准确、更可靠的方法来识别受试者对学习规则的使用，甚至可能识别当前模型没有描述的行为。

How do people play games? More formally, how do people make decisions in strategic situations? This is a question that has concerned game theorists for decades. Do they use the analytic techniques employed by game theorists or do they use other approaches? Evidence from experiments conducted over the past 20 years has shown that in many situations people do not engage in the sort of analysis that a game theorist would. In the last five years, there have been a number of studies aimed at trying to determine if the decision making behavior used by experimental subjects can be described by a few simple learning heuristics and algorithms. The current study first identifies a recurring problem in the methods used to identify player types in these studies and then proposes an alternative experimental design to eliminate this problem. This research is the basis for my dissertation and the funding from the grant will be used in performing the experimental portion of the work. The basic problem with previous studies is that the econometric and statistical methods they use are not capable of discriminating between learning rules. The two basic classes of learning rules differ according to the type of information players are thought to base their decisions on: their own payoff history or past plays by their opponent. Rules that are contained in the same class differ on the particular amount of and manner in which this information is used. Previous studies observed only strategy choices in the experiments and then attempted to use econometric tests to determine simultaneously which type of information the subjects used and how they used it. A simulations based study has shown that these econometric tests fail to be able to succeed in both tasks. Based on the reasons these methods fail, the proposed study includes an extra component in the experiment intended to monitor the use of information by subjects. This is intended to allow the experimenter to determine which type of information the subjects are using in order to aid in the process of modeling their learning or decision making behavior. The result should be a more accurate and reliable means of identifying the use of learning rules among the subjects and possibly even identifying behavior not described by current models.