The Economics of Matching, Dynamic Games, and Crime

匹配、动态游戏和犯罪的经济学

• 批准号: 1103704
• 负责人: Lones Smith
• 金额: $ 13.85万
• 依托单位: University of Wisconsin-Madison
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2010
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2010-08-01 至 2012-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1103704&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Economics; Matching; Dynamic; Games; Crime

This project contains sub-projects spanning four research areas: matching, game theory, information, and crime. The first "Iron Sharpens Iron: Rethinking Dynamic Matching Theory" challenges the traditional economic theory of employment, that workers move when the wage rises. In fact, we know that many take lower paying but higher status jobs as career moves. This project offers a tractable and parameterized framework fleshing out the implications of this insight, assuming that individuals are changed by their environments. It should offer insights about employment decisions, job turnover, and wage volatility. It will explain failures and confirmations of positive sorting across an array of economic and social settings. It should also explain why social matching often yields homogeneous neighborhoods: Likes should match with likes one is pulled types down to the 'weakest link'. From a more applied perspective, this should inform the wisdom of anti-segregation policies and on-the-job training programs alike.The second two sub-projects offer unrelated attacks on a key open theoretical problem in dynamic economics known when individuals repeatedly interact with others and their actions are hidden from view. This problem (known as imperfect private monitoring) is currently at the frontier of the game theoretic approach to economics. Economists have long realized that hidden actions can strangely facilitate cooperation, because individuals can correlate their behavior, thereby achieving outcomes not possible with independent play. The first project constructs and analyzes a tractable upper bound for the set of possible payoffs owing to such correlation. The second introduces a class of repeated interactions when players suffer from a simple form of 'source amnesia'; forgetting how they arrived at their information. While more foundational in nature, this project should shed light on the behavioral implications of forgetfulness.The final sub-project "An Economic Theory of Crime and Vigilance" offers a strategic reformulation of the economic theory of crime, and derives a wealth of new implications that come from an understanding of the equilibrium interplay of vigilance and criminal behavior. Specifically, it derives sharp predictions about the nature of crime across theft levels by explicitly accounting for the motivation of various calibers of criminals in choosing what to steal and potential victims in choosing how carefully to protect their property. This should help us understand the precise cause-effect relation in the underlying determinants of crime.

该项目包含四个研究领域的子项目：匹配，博弈论，信息和犯罪。第一本《打铁还需自身硬：重新思考动态匹配理论》挑战了传统的就业经济理论，即工资上涨时工人就会流动。事实上，我们知道，许多人在职业生涯中从事收入较低但地位较高的工作。该项目提供了一个易于处理的参数化框架，充实了这一见解的含义，假设个人被他们的环境改变。它应该提供有关就业决策，工作流动和工资波动的见解。它将解释在一系列经济和社会环境中积极排序的失败和确认。它还应该解释为什么社会匹配往往产生同质的社区：喜欢应该匹配喜欢一个是拉类型到“最弱的链接”。从更应用的角度来看，这应该为反种族隔离政策和在职培训计划的智慧提供信息。后两个子项目对动态经济学中的一个关键开放理论问题进行了不相关的攻击，即当个人重复互动时，他们的行为是隐藏的。这个问题（被称为不完美的私人监督）目前处于经济学博弈论方法的前沿。经济学家早就意识到，隐藏的行为可以奇怪地促进合作，因为个体可以将他们的行为联系起来，从而实现独立游戏不可能实现的结果。第一个项目构造并分析了一个易于处理的上限，由于这种相关性的可能的回报集。第二种是当玩家患有简单形式的“源健忘症”时，会出现一类重复的交互;忘记他们是如何获得信息的。虽然这个项目在本质上更具有基础性，但它应该揭示遗忘的行为含义。最后一个子项目“犯罪和警惕的经济理论”提供了犯罪经济理论的战略性重新表述，并从对警惕和犯罪行为的平衡相互作用的理解中得出了大量新的含义。具体来说，它通过明确说明各种口径的罪犯在选择偷什么和潜在的受害者在选择如何小心地保护他们的财产的动机，得出了对不同盗窃水平的犯罪性质的尖锐预测。这应该有助于我们理解犯罪的潜在决定因素中的确切因果关系。