Information and Equilibrium

信息与均衡

• 批准号: 0112018
• 负责人: Drew Fudenberg
• 金额: $ 23.07万
• 依托单位: Harvard University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2001
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2001-08-01 至 2005-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0112018&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Information; Equilibrium

This grant supports research on four topics in microeconomic theory. The first two projects questions investigate aspects of "learning in games." This theory is based on the idea that equilibrium in games arises as the result of repeated observations leading players to have common forecasts of opponents' play; it is one of the primary justifications for the widespread use of game-theoretic equilibrium concepts in analyzing economic problems. Most past work on learning in games has assumed that at the end of each round of play, all players observe everyone's actions, which means for examples that bidders in a sealed-bid auction get to see all of the bids, and not just the winning one. The first project relaxes this assumption, and studies the possible long-run outcomes of learning processes in games when players get less information about what the other players have been doing. A second, and related, project studies the interpretation of games of incomplete information from the "learning in games" viewpoint. A particular focus of the project is to question the plausibility of the solution concept "Nash equilibrium without a common prior," which has been used in an increasing number of economic analyzes in recent years. The third project uses equilibrium analysis to study the conditions under which two competing auction houses for the same goods can both survive, as seems to be the case with Christie's and Sotheby's, and when the larger market will squeeze out the smaller one, as some conjecture that Ebay will do to its rivals. A preliminary insight is that buyers may be willing to patronize a market where prices tend to be higher if the variance of the price is higher as well. The fourth project studies the equilibria of infinitely repeated games with private but almost-public information and communication. Simpler models of infinitely repeated games, such as the repeated version of the "prisoner's dilemma" are widely used in economics and other social sciences, the project will extend this analysis to some cases where players only get imperfect and private signals of one another's actions- for example a firm might get evidence of a rival's secret price cuts from an unexpected loss of orders.

该基金支持微观经济理论的四个主题的研究。前两个项目问题调查了“游戏中的学习”的各个方面。这一理论基于这样一种理念：游戏中的平衡是玩家通过反复观察而对对手的玩法做出共同预测的结果；这是在分析经济问题时广泛使用博弈论均衡概念的主要理由之一。过去大多数关于游戏学习的研究都假设，在每一轮游戏结束时，所有玩家都会观察每个人的行为，这意味着在密封竞价拍卖中，竞标者会看到所有的竞标者，而不仅仅是赢家。第一个项目放松了这一假设，并研究了当玩家获得较少关于其他玩家所做事情的信息时，游戏中学习过程可能产生的长期结果。第二个相关的项目是从“游戏中的学习”的角度研究不完全信息博弈的解释。该项目的一个特别重点是质疑解决方案概念“没有共同先验的纳什均衡”的合理性，该概念近年来已在越来越多的经济分析中使用。第三个项目使用均衡分析来研究在何种条件下，两家竞争相同商品的拍卖行都能生存下来，就像佳士得和苏富比的情况一样，以及什么时候较大的市场会挤掉较小的市场，就像一些人猜测Ebay会对其竞争对手所做的那样。一个初步的见解是，如果价格的差异也较大，买家可能愿意光顾价格往往较高的市场。第四个项目研究具有私有但几乎公开的信息和通信的无限重复博弈的均衡。无限重复博弈的简单模型，如“囚徒困境”的重复版本，在经济学和其他社会科学中广泛使用，该项目将把这种分析扩展到一些情况下，即参与者只能获得彼此行为的不完美和私人信号——例如，一家公司可能从意想不到的订单损失中获得竞争对手秘密降价的证据。