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。许多经济情况都涉及重复的互动，决策者无法直接观察其他参与者做出的决策。 在许多这样的情况下，决策者每个人都了解其他人决策的部分信息。 任何由代理人观察其他人的错误行为（并且观察到的内容只有他们自己知道）的游戏都是私人监控的游戏。 现实世界中有很多例子，经济理论最近在开发分析这些博弈的新方法方面取得了实质性进展。 然而，这些理论尚未经过实证检验。 这些游戏有很多现实世界的例子，但从这些例子中收集数据来测试理论是很困难的。 关于特工私下观察的数据很少。此外，从理论的角度来看，其他关键参数通常是不可观察或难以测量的。 鉴于此，实验室为探索此类环境中的行为提供了一个有价值的替代方案。不完美私人监控的经济理论主要考虑了两个极端：近乎完美和近乎公共监控。顾名思义，几乎完美是不完美的，但非常接近完美的监控（其中玩家的信号与他们的行为不相关），而几乎公开是具有私人组件但非常接近公共（其中信号相关）。该奖项资助的新研究在一系列三个项目中研究了近乎完美和近乎公共监测。要解决的第一个问题很简单：当监督不完善且私密时，主体能否支持合作？如果主体确实可以支持某种合作，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，他们的行为有何不同？要探讨的这个问题的一个要求更高的版本是最常使用哪些策略，以及这些策略如何随信息结构的具体情况而变化？这些问题通过在实验室中实施随机终止的囚徒困境游戏的三个项目来解决。这些项目将对我们对私人监控无限重复游戏的了解产生重大影响。它们还将进一步加深我们对不完善监控行为的理解。无限重复的博弈是许多类型的人类互动的特征：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。 了解促进或阻碍合作的因素是社会科学的一个关键问题，这项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。