Enhancing Human Economic Performance

实地观察已经确立了互惠互利的经济行为的普遍性，实验研究已经证明，这种行为在受控的实验室环境中是稳健的。不幸的是，基于个人利益的非合作行为会破坏基于信任的交换。因此，人类不断面临着寻找可信的程序来承诺互惠互利的交流的问题。一个重要的问题是，什么样的社会制度能够促进基于信任的交流。该项目考察了在个人和非个人交易环境中信任关系对市场绩效的影响。在这些实验中，两个签约机构中的每一个都考虑了两种治疗方法。第一个机制是双边谈判，这是相对个人化的。第二种方式是双重拍卖，这种方式更加客观，涉及多边谈判规则，允许通过公开观察的买卖价差进行买卖。这两种处理方式是手动执行合同，即当事人必须选择完成合同，以及自动执行合同，即通过实验软件立即执行合同。目的是调查信任关系的破裂是否以及如何导致市场失灵，以及这种失灵是否与契约制度有关。在过去的十年里，博弈论学家、实验经济学家、经济历史学家、进化心理学家和社会学家的研究成果为实验室实验提供了信息，这些实验帮助发展了考虑经济行为生态合理性的理论；尤其是当人类从小群体的个人交换转向大群体的非个人交换时，激励机制发生了变化。该提案描述了一些新的实验，这些实验研究了在向非个人交换过渡的过程中，人类在市场中的表现是如何失败的。了解人类经济绩效如何依赖于信任关系，并找到有助于促进和维持这种基于信任的绩效的程序，对整个社会越来越重要。一个重要的原因是，许多人预计在线市场将成为未来几十年经济增长的引擎，但正如本文提出的研究将明确指出的那样，由于信任的失败，这些市场可能会失败。特别是，在线市场中的买家和卖家必须与他们知之甚少的对手进行交易，例如，一个不值得信任的买家可能不会付款，或者一个不值得信任的卖家可能不会交付预期的产品。这些可能性是真实存在的：在2000年全国消费者联盟收到的所有网络欺诈投诉中，与在线市场有关的投诉占78%。本提案中提出的研究代表着朝着更好地理解人在市场中的表现与信任之间的联系迈出了一步，并为如何设计市场制度提供了见解，这些制度有助于防止由于信任失败而导致的市场失灵，从而成为未来经济增长的催化剂。

Field observations have established the ubiquity of mutually beneficial, reciprocity based economic behavior, and experimental research has demonstrated that such behavior is robust to controlled laboratory environments. Unfortunately, non-cooperative behavior founded in individual self-interest can corrupt trust-based exchange. Consequently, humans continually face the problem of finding credible procedures to commit to reciprocal, mutually beneficial exchanges. An important question is what kinds of social institutions enhance trust-based exchange. The project examines the implications of trust relationships for market performancein both personal and impersonal exchange settings. In these experiments, two treatments are considered in each of two contracting institutions. The first institution, bilateral bargaining, is relatively personal. The second institution, a double auction, is more impersonal and involves multilateral negotiation rules that allow buying and selling through a publicly observed bid-ask spread. The two treatments are manual contract execution, where a subject must choose to complete their contract, and automatic execution, where contracts are executed immediately through the experimental software. The goal is to investigate whether and how breakdowns in trust relationships can lead to market failure, and whether this failure is related to contracting institutions.Over the last ten years laboratory experiments, informed by the work of game theorists, experimental economists, economic historians, evolutionary psychologists, and sociologists, have helped to develop theories that take account of the ecological rationality of economic behavior; and particularly the way incentives have changed as humans moved from small group personal exchange to large group impersonal exchange. This proposal describes a number of new experiments that examine how the way in which human performance in markets can fail during a transition to impersonal exchange.Understanding how human economic performance relies on trust relationships, and finding procedures that help to facilitate and sustain this trust-based performance, is increasingly important to society at large. One important reason is that online markets are expected by many to be an engine of economic growth over the next few decades, but as the research suggested herein will make clear, these markets can potentially fail because of failures of trust. In particular, buyers and sellers in online markets must transact with counterparts about whom they know very little, and, for example, an untrustworthy buyer might not deliver payment, or an untrustworthy seller might not deliver an expected product. These possibilities are real: complaints relating to online markets accounted for 78 percent of all Internet fraud complaints received by the National Consumers League in 2000. Research presented in this proposal represents a step towards better understanding the link between human performance in markets and trust, and provides insights on how to design market institutions that help to prevent market failures due to trust failures, and that consequently act as catalysts for future economic growth.