Doctoral Dissertation Research in DRMS: Costly Communication and Coordination in Organizations

协调对于日常生活中的社会互动至关重要，对于解决诸如如何避免银行挤兑或如何让一群人作为一个有效的团队一起工作等重要问题也至关重要。在这篇博士论文研究改进基金中，co-PI将进行研究，以更好地理解这些协调问题，其中战略不确定性使帕累托有效均衡具有风险。也就是说，当一个理想的结果明确存在时，对他人行为的不确定性如何影响成功，以及如何避免这种失败？通过使用受控的实验室实验，研究人员将分离出这些现实世界问题的关键特征，以便从根本上了解导致成功或失败的原因。第一个实验在只有两个参与者和两种策略的协调博弈中使用简单的信息和显式成本。即使在这种高度理想化的环境中，结果表明，非常小的通信成本也会大大减少消息的使用，但会增加隐性协调的频率。第二个实验遵循相同的方法，但使用了许多参与者和许多策略，以确定之前的发现是否适用于更复杂的互动。第三个实验探讨的是在一个更接近真实企业模式的环境中的行为，包括免费的文字聊天和沟通的机会成本（而不是自付成本）。这些实验中的每一个都直接建立在现有研究的基础上，它们一起将为更好地理解代价高昂的沟通及其对战略不确定性和协调的影响奠定基础。

Coordination is critical to the social interactions of everyday life, as well as solving important problems such as how to avoid bank runs or how to get a group of people to work together as an effective team. In this Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, the co-PI will conduct research to better understand coordination problems like these where strategic uncertainty makes the Pareto efficient equilibrium risky. That is, when an ideal outcome clearly exists, how does uncertainty about the actions of others undermine success and how can such failures be avoided? By using controlled laboratory experiments, the researchers will isolate key features of these real world problems in order to understand what leads to success or failure at a fundamental level. The first experiment uses simple messages and explicit costs in a coordination game with only two players and two strategies. Even in this highly idealized environment, the results show that very small communication costs dramatically decrease the use of messages but increase the frequency of tacit coordination. The second experiment follows the same approach but uses many players and many strategies in order to determine whether the previous findings apply to more complex interactions. The third experiment explores behavior in an environment that more closely models that of real firms, including free text chat and opportunity costs (as opposed to out-of-pocket costs) of communication. Each of these experiments builds directly from existing research and together will form the groundwork for a better understanding of costly communication and its effects on strategic uncertainty and coordination.