An Experimental Study of Strategic Complementarity, Asynchronicity and Mechanism Design

这个实验经济学的研究项目将有限理性和学习纳入了机制设计框架。该项目包括两个部分。第一部分是关于激励相容的公共产品机制的三项实验研究。公共物品的存在严重挑战了私人物品分配的传统或“自然”解决方案。激励相容的机制使个人自身利益与群体利益保持一致。研究者以前的工作和其他人的工作表明，在这些激励相容机制中，那些超模块的机制，即当参与者的策略是战略互补时，强健地收敛到纳什均衡预测，而那些不是超模块的机制也不收敛。该项目审查战略互补程度是否会对机制的趋同产生重大影响，即这一进程是否是渐进的。对三种不同程度战略互补性的公共物品提供超模块机制进行了实验研究。收敛是选择一种机制来解决特定问题的一个重要标准，因为在学习过程的最后，我们希望该机制产生期望的结果。第二部分包括两个关于分布式系统中机制设计的实验研究，如因特网，这两个系统具有异步性和有限信息的特点。在各种各样的现实世界中，一组代理共享一个共同的生产过程，将输入转化为输出。互联网提供了一个突出的例子，它在全球电信中变得越来越重要。在多个代理共享网络链路的情况下，要分担的成本是经历拥塞的。在网络环境中，传统的解概念，如纳什均衡或序列非支配集可能不适用。Friedman和Shenker(1998)为分布式系统提出了新的解决方案概念。该项目通过实验来检验这些新的解决方案概念。该项目还对完全信息和同步移动以及有限信息和不同程度异步化的分布式环境下的平均成本定价和串联成本分担机制进行了实验研究。这项研究将提供关于在分布式系统中应该选择什么类型的机制的信息。

This program of research in experimental economics incorporates bounded rationality and learning into the mechanism design framework. The project has two parts. The first consists of three experimental studies of incentive-compatible public goods mechanisms. The presence of public goods seriously challenges traditional or "natural" solutions for the allocation of private goods. Incentive-compatible mechanisms align individual self-interests with the group interest. The investigator's previous work and others' work have shown that among these incentive compatible mechanisms those which are supermodular, i.e., when players' strategies are strategic complements, converge robustly well to the Nash equilibrium prediction, and those which are not supermodular do not converge as well. This project examines whether the degree of strategic complementarity could have a significant effect on the convergence of a mechanism, i.e., whether the process is gradual. Experiments are conducted on three supermodular mechanisms for public goods provision with varying degrees of strategic complementarity to study this effect. Convergence is an important criterion for selecting a mechanism to solve a particular problem because at the end of the learning process we would like the mechanism to yield the desired outcome.The second part consists of two experimental studies of mechanism design in distributed systems, such as the Internet, which are characterized by asynchronicity and limited information. In a wide variety of real world situations a group of agents share a common production process transforming input into output. A salient example is provided by the Internet, which has becoming increasingly important in global telecommunications. In the context of several agents sharing a network link, the cost to be shared is congestion experienced. In the network context, traditional solution concepts such as Nash equilibrium or the serially undominated set might not apply. Friedman and Shenker (1998) propose new solution concepts for distributed systems. This project runs experiments to examine these new solution concepts. The project also conducts experiments to study the average cost pricing and the serial cost sharing mechanisms under complete information and synchronous moves, as well as distributed settings with limited information and varying degrees of asynchrony. This study will provide information on what types of mechanisms should be selected in distributed systems.