Collaborative Research: Theoretical Investigations of Some Empirical Puzzles Regarding Behavior in Relationships with Asymmetric Information

这个项目将开发正式的微观经济模型，以解决目前模型无法回答的两个重要问题。第一个项目将考虑持续关系中的合作和执行。其目的是为伴侣惩罚不良行为的重要和鲜为人知的行为模式提供解释。例如，刑事司法系统的结构是对重复犯罪施加更严厉的惩罚，我们在其他关系中也观察到了这种模式。另一个例子是操纵价格的卡特尔；企业拒绝遵守先前存在的卡特尔协议，从卡特尔伙伴那里窃取业务，通常不会受到整个卡特尔的惩罚。同样，这种不惩罚在其他情况下也得到了遵守。虽然这些模式普遍存在，但持续关系的标准经济学理论并不足以预测我们何时会观察到这种行为。相反，这些理论预测，惩罚应该是持续严厉的，并且应该始终得到执行。首席研究人员将开发一种新的理论来解决这些问题。第二个项目试图解释为什么“50-50”的标准在广泛的实际情况下具有影响力--例如公司之间的合资企业、农业中的共享租户、朋友之间的餐厅账单划分--以及在各种实验室环境中。主要的经济学理论将这种行为归因于对公平的偏好，但未能为现有的实验证据提供完整的解释。研究人员将开发和分析一种新的理论，该理论假设人们喜欢被认为是公平的，以及更喜欢公平的结果。

This project will develop formal microeconomic models to address two important questions that cannot be answered with current models.The first project will consider cooperation and enforcement in ongoing relationships. The goal is to develop explanations for important and poorly understood behavioral patterns in how partners punish bad behavior. For example, the criminal justice system is structured with more severe punishments for repeat offenses, a pattern we have observed in other relationships as well. Another example is seen in price-fixing cartels; firms refusing to adhere to a pre-existing cartel agreement by stealing business from cartel partners are often not punished by the cartel as a whole. Again, such non-punishment has also been observed in other contexts. While these patterns are widespread, standard economic theories of on-going relationships do not do an adequate job of predicting when we will observe such behavior. These theories predict instead that punishment should be of constant severity and should always be carried out. The principal investigators will develop a new theory to address these issues.The second project attempts to explain why a "50-50" norm is influential in a wide range of practical circumstances - such as joint ventures among corporations, share tenancy in agriculture, the division of restaurant tabs among friends - as well as in a variety of laboratory settings. The leading economic theories, which attribute this behavior to preferences for fairness, fail to provide a complete explanation for existing experimental evidence. The investigators will develop and analyze a new theory that postulates that people like to be perceived as fair, as well as preferring fair outcomes.