Theoretical and Experimental Research on Voting and Bargaining Games

投票与讨价还价博弈的理论与实验研究

• 批准号: 0962802
• 负责人: Thomas Palfrey
• 金额: $ 31.16万
• 依托单位: California Institute of Technology
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2010
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2010-07-01 至 2014-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0962802&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Theoretical; Experimental; Research; Voting; Bargaining

Intellectual merits: This research project studies strategic voting and committee bargaining mechanisms under conditions of incomplete information from both theoretical and experimental perspectives. Many questions remain unresolved about the general theoretical problem of designing optimal voting mechanisms to efficiently aggregate preferences and information, without explicit side payments, and also about actual behavior under such mechanisms. Theoretically, there are questions of the relative performance of different voting mechanisms, where performance can be evaluated relative to several different objectives, including economic efficiency, informational efficiency, and equity. The research approaches voting behavior from a mechanism design perspective, and compares the performance of different voting mechanisms in different kinds of environments. The research encompasses five projects in political economy. Three of these projects will explore promising extensions of the research initiated under the current grant. These are: (1) The Dynamic Political Economy of Public Infrastructure; (2) Strategic Voting and Information Acquisition in Committees; and (3) Vote Trading in Committees. The first follows naturally from the dynamic political bargaining model studied under the current grant. Bargaining agreements evolve over time, with past bargaining outcomes setting the table for current and future rounds of bargaining. We extend that pure private good model to incorporate a dimension of durable public goods, or "public infrastructure." We propose to compare the effects of different voting rules and government organization on the bargaining process, especially with respect to the effects on efficient investment in public infrastructure. The second project evolved from experimental studies conducted by the PI and collaborators on the "swing voter's curse," a phenomenon whereby less informed voters have incentives to either abstain or even vote strategically against the outcome they would choose if the decision they would choose on their own. The extension endogenizes the acquisition of information by voters. The third part of the proposed research involves studying new voting mechanisms that allow voters to express preference intensities over a multiple decisions across different issue dimensions. We apply competitive equilibrium analysis to this kind of environment and propose a new equilibrium concept with vote trading, called "ex ante exchange equilibrium." We then study the predictive power of this model by setting up controlled laboratory "vote markets." The emphasis is on the comparative statics predictions and the efficiency properties. The two additional projects are: (4) The Emergence of Efficiency in Dynamic Coordination Problems; and (5) Dynamic Cursed Equilibrium with an Application to Sophisticated Voting in Dynamic Agendas with Incomplete Information. The analysis of the data will explore these extended models of limited rationality to help explain where and why the theory seems to be adequate and where and why it misses. Project (4) characterizes efficient dynamic equilibria subject to constraints imposed by the symmetry structure of the coordination game. We will design and conduct experiments that look at the effects of the number of players in the group and also the effects of the symmetry structure of the game. Project (5) explores a new specification of limited strategic sophistication that extends the cursed equilibrium to extensive form games. It extends the cursed equilibrium logic from traditional "mixed strategies" (strategic form) to behavioral strategies. The original formulation was done in strategic form and so the idea of cursed equilibrium did not have bite in many sequential contexts. We apply this to a variety of sequential games,in particular sequential voting with incomplete information. Broader impacts: In addition to basic research, the proposed research has an education component, by training graduate students in experimental economics and economic theory. The ultimate goal of the research is to better understand how procedures in commitees affect decision making and with and eye to understanding how these procedures may be modified to improve decision making and overcome obstacles such as conflicting preferences and beliefs, and asymmetric information. This better understanding in the long run can improve performance of organizations and policy-making institutions. The performance of voting procedures are evaluated according to traditional economic welfare criteria, informational efficiency, and equity. There is extensive software development proposed under the grant. This software may be used freely by other researchers in experimental economics and will be publicly available as open source code.

智力优点：本研究从理论和实验两个角度对不完全信息条件下的策略性投票和委员会谈判机制进行了研究。许多问题仍然没有解决的一般理论问题，设计最佳的投票机制，有效地聚集偏好和信息，没有明确的边支付，也是在这种机制下的实际行为。从理论上讲，存在不同投票机制的相对绩效问题，其中绩效可以相对于几个不同的目标进行评估，包括经济效率，信息效率和公平。本研究从机制设计的角度探讨投票行为，并比较不同投票机制在不同环境下的表现。该研究包括政治经济学的五个项目。其中三个项目将探索在当前赠款下启动的研究的有前途的扩展。这些措施包括：（1）公共基础设施的动态政治经济学;（2）委员会中的战略投票和信息获取;（3）委员会中的投票交易。第一个自然遵循动态政治谈判模型下研究目前的赠款。谈判协议随着时间的推移而演变，过去的谈判结果为当前和未来的谈判奠定了基础。我们扩展了纯私人物品模型，将耐用公共物品或“公共基础设施”纳入其中。“我们建议比较不同的投票规则和政府组织对谈判过程的影响，特别是对公共基础设施有效投资的影响。第二个项目是由PI和合作者对“摇摆选民的诅咒”进行的实验研究发展而来的，这种现象是指不太知情的选民有动机弃权，甚至有策略地投票反对他们自己选择的结果。这种延伸使选民对信息的获取内生化。拟议研究的第三部分涉及研究新的投票机制，允许选民在不同的问题维度上表达对多个决策的偏好强度。我们将竞争均衡分析应用于这类环境，并提出了一个新的均衡概念，即“事前交换均衡”。然后，我们通过建立受控的实验室“投票市场”来研究这个模型的预测能力。“重点是比较静态预测和效率特性。另外两个项目是：（4）动态协调问题中效率的出现;和（5）动态诅咒均衡及其在不完全信息动态决策中复杂投票的应用。对数据的分析将探索这些有限理性的扩展模型，以帮助解释该理论在哪里以及为什么似乎是足够的，以及在哪里以及为什么它错过了。项目（4）描述了受协调博弈对称结构约束的有效动态均衡。我们将设计并进行实验，研究小组中玩家数量的影响以及游戏对称结构的影响。项目（5）探索了一种新的有限战略复杂性规范，将被诅咒的均衡扩展到广泛的形式博弈。它将被诅咒的均衡逻辑从传统的“混合战略”（战略形式）扩展到行为战略。最初的表述是以战略的形式完成的，因此诅咒均衡的想法在许多顺序的上下文中并不重要。我们将其应用到各种顺序博弈中，特别是不完全信息的顺序投票。更广泛的影响：除了基础研究之外，拟议的研究还包括教育部分，通过培训实验经济学和经济理论的研究生。研究的最终目标是更好地了解委员会的程序如何影响决策，并着眼于了解如何修改这些程序，以改善决策，克服诸如偏好和信念冲突以及信息不对称等障碍。从长远来看，这种更好的理解可以改善组织和决策机构的业绩。根据传统的经济福利标准，信息效率和公平性来评估投票程序的性能。在赠款下提议进行广泛的软件开发。该软件可供实验经济学的其他研究人员免费使用，并将作为开源代码公开提供。