Infinitely Repeated Games with Private Monitoring: An Experimental Analysis

带私人监控的无限重复游戏：实验分析

• 批准号: 1225779
• 负责人: Guillaume Frechette
• 金额: $ 30.12万
• 依托单位: New York University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-09-01 至 2016-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1225779&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Infinitely; Repeated; Games; Private; Monitoring

This award funds research that will employ laboratory experiments to test game theory models of strategic interaction.Many economic situations involve repeated interactions where decision makers cannot directly observe the decisions made by other participants. In many of these situations, decision makers each have partial information about others' decisions. Any game where agents observe what the others do with error (and what is observed is only known to them) is a game with private monitoring. There are many real world examples, and economic theory has recently made substantial progress in developing new methods for analyzing these games. However, these theories have not yet been subjected to empirical testing. There are many real-world examples of these games, but gathering data from these examples to test the theory is difficult. Data about what agents privately observe is rare. Furthermore, other critical parameters from the point of view of the theory are often not observable or difficult to measure. Given this, the laboratory offers a valuable alternative to explore behavior in such environments.The economic theory of imperfect private monitoring has mainly considered two extremes: almost perfect and almost public monitoring. As the names imply, almost perfect is imperfect but very close to perfect monitoring (where the players' signals are uncorrelated conditional on their actions) and almost public is has a private component but is very close to public (where signals are correlated). The new research funded with this award studies both almost perfect and almost public monitoring, in a series of three projects. The first question to be addressed is simple: can subjects support cooperation when monitoring is imperfect and private? If indeed subjects can support some cooperation, then the next question is how is their behavior different when monitoring is private as opposed to public or perfect? A more demanding version of this question to be explored is what strategies are most often used, and how do these vary with the particulars of the information structure? These are addressed by three projects implementing randomly terminated prisoner's dilemma games in the laboratory. These projects will have a substantial impact on what we know about infinitely repeated games with private monitoring. They will also further our understanding of behavior with imperfect monitoring more generally.Infinitely repeated games are characteristic of many types of human interactions: political, psychological, sociological, et cetera; making this project intrinsically interdisciplinary. Hence, these results will be relevant to many applications. Understanding factors that facilitate or hinder cooperation is a key question in the social sciences, and this research will provide partial answers. The PI will also be contributing to both graduate and undergraduate education; a wide variety of students will participate in this research.

该奖项资助的研究将采用实验室实验来测试战略互动的博弈论模型。许多经济情况涉及决策者无法直接观察其他参与者所做的决策的重复互动。 在许多这样的情况下，每个决策者都有关于其他人的决策的部分信息。 任何一个代理人观察其他人做错了什么的游戏（观察到的只有他们自己知道）都是一个有私人监控的游戏。 有许多真实的世界的例子，经济理论最近在开发分析这些游戏的新方法方面取得了实质性的进展。 然而，这些理论尚未经过实证检验。 现实世界中有很多这样的游戏，但从这些例子中收集数据来测试理论是很困难的。 关于特工们私下观察到的数据是罕见的。此外，从理论的角度来看，其他关键参数往往是不可观察或难以测量的。 有鉴于此，实验室提供了一个有价值的替代方案，以探索在这种环境下的行为。不完美的私人监督的经济理论主要考虑了两个极端：几乎完美和几乎公共监督。正如名字所暗示的，几乎完美是不完美的，但非常接近完美的监控（参与者的信号不相关，取决于他们的行为），几乎公共是有一个私人的组成部分，但非常接近公共（信号相关）。该奖项资助的新研究在一系列的三个项目中研究了几乎完美和几乎公开的监测。要解决的第一个问题很简单：当监测不完善且不公开时，主体是否能够支持合作？如果受试者确实支持某种合作，那么下一个问题是，当监控是私人的，而不是公共的或完美的时，他们的行为有什么不同？这个问题的一个更需要探讨的版本是什么策略是最常用的，以及这些策略如何随着信息结构的细节而变化？这些都是解决了三个项目实施随机终止的囚徒困境游戏在实验室中。这些项目将对我们所知道的私人监控下的无限重复游戏产生重大影响。他们也将进一步我们的行为与不完善的监测更普遍的理解。无休止的重复游戏是许多类型的人类互动的特点：政治，心理，社会学，等等;使这个项目本质上是跨学科的。因此，这些结果将与许多应用相关。 理解促进或阻碍合作的因素是社会科学中的一个关键问题，本研究将提供部分答案。 PI还将为研究生和本科生教育做出贡献;各种各样的学生将参与这项研究。