DHB Games Theory, Culture, and Institutional Path Dependence.

DHB 博弈论、文化和制度路径依赖。

• 批准号: 0524919
• 负责人: Jenna Bednar
• 金额: $ 12.5万
• 依托单位: Regents of the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2006
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2006-01-01 至 2007-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0524919&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: DHB; Games; Theory; Culture; Institutional

Culture sits between institutions and economic or political achievement, affecting performance. Whether looking horizontally across countries or vertically through time, one lesson is clear: the efficacy of institutions such as markets, democracies, and legal systems hinges upon behavior, particularly on the tendency for people to cooperate with and trust one another. A theory of institutional performance, therefore, must come to grips with culture. We meet this challenge with a modification of the traditional game-theoretic approach. Game theory, the preferred formal framework for analyzing institutions, assumes isolated, context-free strategic environments and optimal behavior within them. Thus, game theory would seem to be at a loss to explain the patterned, contextual, and sometimes suboptimal behavior we think of as culture, let alone its emergence and persistence across space and time. We have developed a method to examine how people respond to multiple institutional environments---games---simultaneously (hence the games theory moniker). Preliminary models suggest that when purposeful, incentive-driven agents confront multiple strategic situations simultaneously and when cognitive effort is costly, culturally distinct behavior may emerge and be unavoidable. Therefore, a second goal is to uncover how the addition of new institutions---including timing and combinations with other institutions---may affect culture, creating a more profitable and peaceful climate. The proposed research consists of four parts. First, the researchers construct agent based and game theoretic models that produce cultural behavior. Second, they conduct experiments with human subjects to corroborate those agent based models. Third, they define a classification to clarify and refine what is meant by path dependence, highlighting a distinction between processes that depend on the path of history and processes that depend only on the set of historical events but not their order. Fourth, they construct an agent based model that tests whether path dependence emerges that they then also test with human subjects. This research effort brings together a political scientist trained in the study of institutions, a complex systems scholar who connects mathematical and agent based models, and an experimental and theoretical economist who specializes in learning and public economics. All three investigators are well versed in game theory which will serve as a translating language between the various methodologies applied.

文化介于制度和经济或政治成就之间，影响着绩效。 无论是横向观察国家还是纵向观察时间，有一个教训是明确的：市场、民主和法律的体系等制度的效力取决于行为，特别是人们相互合作和信任的倾向。 因此，一个关于机构绩效的理论必须与文化相结合。 我们迎接这一挑战与传统的博弈论方法的修改。 博弈论是分析制度的首选正式框架，它假设孤立的、与背景无关的战略环境和其中的最佳行为。 因此，博弈论似乎无法解释我们认为是文化的模式化、情境化，有时甚至是次优的行为，更不用说它在时空中的出现和持续了。 我们开发了一种方法来研究人们如何同时对多种制度环境-游戏-作出反应（因此有了游戏理论的绰号）。 初步模型表明，当有目的的，激励驱动的代理同时面临多个战略情况下，当认知努力是昂贵的，文化上不同的行为可能会出现，是不可避免的。 因此，第二个目标是揭示新制度的加入-包括时机和与其他制度的结合-如何影响文化，创造一个更有利可图与和平的环境。本研究共分四个部分。 首先，研究人员构建了基于代理和博弈论的模型，产生文化行为。 其次，他们对人类受试者进行实验以证实这些基于代理的模型。 第三，他们定义了一种分类，以澄清和细化路径依赖的含义，突出了依赖于历史路径的过程与仅依赖于历史事件集而不是其顺序的过程之间的区别。 第四，他们构建了一个基于代理的模型，测试是否出现路径依赖，然后他们也与人类受试者测试。这项研究工作汇集了一位受过机构研究培训的政治学家，一位连接数学和基于代理的模型的复杂系统学者，以及一位专门研究学习和公共经济学的实验和理论经济学家。 这三位研究人员都精通博弈论，这将作为所应用的各种方法之间的翻译语言。