The Foundations of Cooperation

该项目继续并扩展了主要研究人员以前在社会组织方面的工作，并在很大程度上借鉴了我们以前在这一领域的国家科学基金会项目。该项目的成果将使人们更好地了解大团体中的合作。有大量关于动态博弈的工作，展示了在何种情况下，可以在一组代理中强制合作，这些代理的行为具有战略性。这项工作的大部分动机是寡头垄断问题，参与者相对较少；这些模型的见解对大集团中的合作提供了一种不完全令人满意的理解。该项目由两部分组成。第一部分涉及权威--它是什么，一个人如何获得它，维护它，并使用它。其目的是提供对权威的理解，以个人协调其他玩家行动的能力为中心。一个好的权威模式应该满足几个愿望，包括：(1)当一群代理人响应个人的通告协调他们的行为时，个人就拥有权威；(2)个人与权威的动机之间存在紧张关系，以维护权威和利用他的权威；(3)太大的灵活性或不可预测性会摧毁权威；(4)权威不需要反映某种特殊能力；(V)权威并不是由玩家简单地在“权威”数字所确定的均衡上进行协调而产生的。惩罚是动态游戏中大多数合作模式的核心成分，惩罚通常采取在感觉到偏离规定的游戏后协调行动的形式。在惩罚偏差方面的协调通常依赖于参与者之间关于过去偏差信号的共同知识或近乎共同的知识。这样的共识不太可能来自玩家在大群体中的直接观察，任何共识都可能涉及到群体成员之间的沟通。该项目的第二部分涉及将交流添加到动态游戏中。仅有通信的可能性并不能确保合作；通信协议必须激励代理诚实地透露他们的信息，以便执行合作。最近引入了代理的信息量的概念，以获取单个代理私下持有的信息的重要性，将其他代理的信息视为已知的。该项目调查了信息大小和可以构建激励措施以诱导代理人透露私人信息的程度之间的关系。布罗德影响本研究将提供更好的理解，以了解如何在大型社会群体中获得合作。经济学和其他社会科学的一个核心问题也是，为什么一些国家或集团的表现不如其他国家或集团。业绩的差异似乎主要不是由于可用资源的差异，这表明社会组织的差异可能是重要的。该项目侧重于社会组织的特定方面--权威和沟通--作为社会内可能的合作程度的重要决定因素。这项研究将通过提供将社会结构与社会绩效联系起来的模型，为旨在了解社会差异的更多应用工作提供基础。

The project continues and extends the principal investigators' previous work on the organization of society, and draws heavily on our previous National Science Foundation projects in this area. The results of the project will provide a better understanding of cooperation in large groups. There is a large body of work on dynamic games that demonstrates the circumstances under which cooperation can be enforced in groups of agents behaving strategically. Much of this work has been motivated by oligopolistic problems with relatively few players; the insights from these models provide a less than completely satisfactory understanding of cooperation in large groups.The project consists of two parts. The first part addresses authority - what it is, how a person might acquire it, maintain it, and use it. The aim is to provide an understanding of authority that centers on an individual's ability to coordinate other players' actions. A good model of authority should satisfy several desiderata, including: (i) An individual has authority when a group of agents coordinates their behavior in response to announcements by that individual; (ii) There is a tension between the incentives of the individual with authority to maintain that authority and to take advantage of his authority; (iii) Too much flexibility or unpredictability can destroy authority; (iv) Authority need not reflect some special ability; (v) Authority does not arise from players simply coordinating on an equilibrium identified by the "authority" figure.Punishment is a central ingredient of most models of cooperation in dynamic games, with punishment typically taking the form of coordinated actions following perceived deviations from prescribed play. The coordination in punishing deviations often rests on common knowledge, or near common knowledge, among the players about past signals of deviations. Such consensus is unlikely to arise from players' direct observations in large groups, and any consensus is likely to involve communication among the members of the group. The second part of the project involves adding communication to dynamic games. The mere possibility of communication will not ensure cooperation; the communication protocol must give agents an incentive to truthfully reveal their information for cooperation to be enforced.The notion of informational size of agents has been recently introduced to capture the importance of information held privately by a single agent, taking the information of other agents as given. The project investigates the connection between informational size and the degree to which incentives can be constructed to induce agents to reveal private information.Broader ImpactsThe research will provide a better understanding of how cooperation obtains in large social groups. A central question in economics and other social sciences as well is why some countries or groups do less well than others. The variation in performance seems not due primarily to differences in available resources, suggesting that differences in social organization are likely to be important. The project focuses on particular aspects of social organization - authority and communication - as important determinants of the level of cooperation possible within a society. The research will provide a foundation for more applied work aimed at understanding differences among societies by providing models linking social structure to social performance.