Continued Studies of Endogenous Mechanisms

这一成就基于继续研究集体决策机制或机构设计的更新建议，从投票制度到市场。关于这一主题的文献通常将决策问题和可能的决策集视为外生的。在这个项目下的研究主要集中在代理在选择集是什么，决策问题本身是什么，甚至他们将使用哪种机制来做出决策的情况下有自由裁量权。研究的第一部分研究了社会如何通过将不同集体决策问题的决策联系起来而获益。在研究集体决策时，将决策问题视为外生的。然而，通过将不同的、可能完全不相关的问题的决策联系起来，一个社会可以实现帕累托改进，而不是孤立地对相同的问题做出决策。特别是，在激励方面，能够问agent诸如“你更关心哪个问题”这样的问题是非常有用的研究的第二部分将继续研究社会如何选择投票规则。特别是，它将研究一个社会对可能涉及一系列投资的项目做出决定的情况。在这样一个动态的投票环境中，出现了几个有趣的情况，包括“期权价值”考虑因素，以及可能具有非单调效应的投票规则的更改。这项研究将确定有效的机制及其与不确定性结构的关系，以及了解选民自己将选择哪些机制来处理这些问题。研究的最后一部分着眼于投票程序，即公民选出代表，然后代表他们参加投票。在这里，研究将分析如何在一个有效的规则中权衡不同群体代表的投票，以及参与者如何选择这些权重，以及这可能如何影响联盟首次形成时谁成为联盟一部分的选择。

This accomplishment based renewal proposal for continued research in the design of mechanisms or institutions for collective decision-making, ranging from voting systems to markets. The literature on this subject usually takes the decision problem and set of possible decisions to be exogenous. The research under this project focuses on situations where agents have discretion in what the set of alternatives are, what the decision problem itself is, and even which mechanism they will use to make a decision. The first part of the research studies how societies might gain by linking decisions across different collective decision problems. In studying collective decision-making, the decision problem is taken as exogenous. However, by linking the decisions over different, possibly completely unrelated problems, a society can achieve Pareto improvements relative to making decisions over the same problems in isolation. In particular, it is very helpful in terms of incentives to be able to ask agent's questions like "Which problem do you care more about?" The second part of the research will continue to study how societies choose the voting rules. In particular, it will examine situations where a society makes decisions over projects that may involve a sequence of investments. In such a dynamic voting environment, several interesting cases, including "option-value" considerations, and changes in voting rules that can have non-monotonic effects, arise. This research will identify efficient mechanisms and their relation to the structure of uncertainty, as well as understanding which mechanisms would be selected by the voters themselves to deal with such issues. The last part of the research looks at a voting procedure where citizens elect representatives who then participate in later votes on their behalf. Here the research will analyze how the votes of the representatives of different groups should be weighed in an efficient rule, as well as how such weights might be selected by participants and how this might affect the choice of who becomes part of a union when the union is first formed.