Collaborative Research: The Impact of Advice on Decision Making

合作研究：建议对决策的影响

• 批准号: 0425118
• 负责人: Andrew Schotter
• 金额: $ 23.4万
• 依托单位: New York University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2004
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2004-08-01 至 2007-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0425118&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Impact; Advice; Decision

The PI team's past research on decision making under the influence of advice has led to a body of experimental results that indicate that word-of-mouth advice is a very powerful force in shaping the decisions that people make and tends to push those decisions in the direction of the predictions of the rational theory. More precisely, their previous research has indicated that: 1) Laboratory subjects tend to follow the advice of naive advisors, i.e. advisors that are hardly any more expert in the task they are engaged in than they are. 2) This advice changes their behavior in the sense that subjects who play games or make decisions with naive advice play differently than those who play identical games without such advice. 3) The decisions made in games played with naive advice are closer to the predictions of economic theory than those made without it. 4) If given a choice between getting advice or the information upon which that advice was based, subjects tend to opt for the advice indicating a kind of under-confidence in their decision making abilities that is counter to the usual ego-centric bias or overconfidence observed by psychologists. 5) The reason why advice increases efficiency or rationality is that the process of giving and or receiving advice forces a decision maker to think about the problem they are facing in a way different from the way they would do so if no advice were offered. This research project will continue experimental research on the role of advice giving and receiving in a variety of economic environments with strategic and state uncertainty. There are three main foci of the research, each with a distinct experimental program. These are (i) the role of advice in individual decision-making, (ii) the role of advice in learning transfer, and (iii) the role of advice in intra-generational convention formation. The goal is to investigate the role that advice can play in improving by incorporating some of the elements of the previous research on individual decision-making , We will compare the play of subjects who receive advice from "experts" who have played the game previously with the play of subjects who are only able to view the history of play of the experts. We will also manipulate the amount of experience the advice giver has, e.g., as little as one period of experience or as much as 100 periods of experience. Previous and ongoing research on learning transfer -referring to the process whereby experience in one environment helps one to understand how to behave in another environment-has been concerned mainly with the question of how and whether individuals are able to learn some general principles that apply in related strategic situations. In general, learning transfer does not seem to be very strong. Individuals have trouble carrying over general game-theoretic principles from one environment to another, even if the specific application of the principle in one environment appears to be understood. As so much of the previous research has shown that the presence of advice in strategic situations tends to be rationality-enhancing, we will investigate the role that advice plays in improving learning transfer. The PIs have studied inter-generational (or vertical) advice giving and receiving in many different games, but another dimension of interaction that figures prominently in theories of social and cultural evolution is the intra-generational (or horizontal) dimension, in which members of the same generation interact with and influence one another, and it seems natural to ask what the role of advice giving and receiving might be here as well. The PIs will study this dimension of advice-giving and receiving in order to quantify, for example, the relationship between the strength of a convention of behavior within a generation to the continuation probability of that convention over subsequent generations of players.

PI团队过去对建议影响下的决策的研究已经产生了一系列实验结果，这些结果表明口头建议在塑造人们做出的决定方面是一种非常强大的力量，并且倾向于将这些决定推向理性理论预测的方向。更确切地说，他们以前的研究表明： 1)实验对象倾向于听从天真顾问的建议，也就是说，这些顾问在他们所从事的任务中几乎没有任何专家。 2)这个建议改变了他们的行为，在这个意义上，那些玩游戏或根据天真的建议做出决定的受试者，与那些在没有这样的建议的情况下玩相同游戏的受试者，玩得不一样。 3)在有天真的建议的游戏中做出的决定比没有它的游戏更接近经济理论的预测。 4)如果让受试者在获得建议或获得建议所依据的信息之间做出选择，受试者倾向于选择那些表明他们对自己的决策能力缺乏信心的建议，这与心理学家观察到的通常的自我中心偏见或过度自信相反。 5)建议之所以能提高效率或合理性，是因为给予和/或接受建议的过程迫使决策者以一种与没有建议时不同的方式思考他们所面临的问题。本研究项目将继续对在具有战略和状态不确定性的各种经济环境中给予和接受建议的作用进行实验研究。 有三个主要的研究重点，每个都有一个独特的实验方案。 这些是（一）在个人决策咨询的作用，（二）在学习转移咨询的作用，（三）在代内公约的形成咨询的作用。 目标是调查咨询意见在改善个人决策方面所起的作用， 我们将比较从以前玩过游戏的“专家”那里得到建议的受试者的游戏与只能查看专家游戏历史的受试者的游戏。 我们还将操纵建议提供者的经验量，例如，少则一个周期的经验，多则100个周期的经验。 以往和正在进行的研究学习迁移-指的是在一个环境中的经验，帮助一个人了解如何在另一个环境中的行为的过程-一直主要关注的问题，个人如何以及是否能够学习一些适用于相关的战略情况下的一般原则。 一般来说，学习迁移似乎不是很强。个人很难将一般的博弈论原则从一个环境带到另一个环境，即使在一个环境中该原则的具体应用似乎是理解的。 由于之前的许多研究表明，在策略情境中建议的存在往往会增强理性，因此我们将研究建议在改善学习迁移中所起的作用。 PI研究了许多不同游戏中的代际（或垂直）建议给予和接受，但在社会和文化进化理论中突出的另一个互动维度是代内（或水平）维度，其中同一代人的成员相互影响，这似乎很自然地问，建议给予和接受在这里可能扮演什么角色。PI将研究给出和接受建议的这个维度，以便量化，例如，一代人内行为惯例的强度与该惯例在随后几代参与者中的延续概率之间的关系。