Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: The Economic Value of Natural Language Communication

我们提出了一个项目，以增加对自然语言交流的经济价值的理解，无论是从理论上还是从经验上。语言是促进社会和经济决策的强大而复杂的人类工具。自然语言丰富而详细的结构显然在进化过程中幸存了下来，这导致一些经济学家辩称，它不仅对于理解语法，而且对于理解人类的社会和经济决策都很重要。因此，长期以来一直认为，丰富语言的存在应该在博弈论中发挥更突出的作用(见Farrell，1993)。与此同时，其他人的经验表明，与参与者可以参与有限形式的交流的情况相反，当参与者能够使用丰富的自然语言进行交流时，更容易产生有效的经济结果。我们在这里的目的是提出和测试一个正式的框架，它预测人们以一种改善协调的方式使用和回应多义自然语言。这个项目调查了为什么低调的自然语言交流被系统地发现比预先确定的意图信号更能促进协调。我们假设的原因是，当人们用自然语言进行交流时，人们既使用意图和态度，也对意图和态度做出回应，其中态度表明了信息发送者希望信息被关注的强烈程度。我们使用美国和中国的受控实验室实验来验证我们的假设。我们的初步数据表明：(I)自由形式的信息确实包括表示的意图和态度；(Ii)人们在做出决定时既对意图又对态度做出反应；(Iii)态度的使用显著提高了协调性。此外，虽然男性和女性对意图和态度的识别和反应都一样好，但我们发现女性比男性更有可能发出更苛刻的信号，而男性发出的信息更关注平衡结果，而不是态度。总体而言，我们发现，在我们的环境中，自然语言交流可以用一种既包括意图又包括态度的语言来很好地模拟。我们建议进行更多的实验，以评估这些结果在各种游戏和社交学习环境中是否稳健。特别是，基于一份成熟的文献，我们建议测试这一假设，即自然语言带来的独特价值超过了社会历史知识或狭隘构建的建议。我们的研究有助于确定促进协调的自然语言交流的特征，也有助于揭示可能促进有效经济成果的交流系统的性质。

We propose a project to increase understanding of the economic value of natural language communication both theoretically and empirically. Language is a powerful and complex human tool facilitating social and economic decisions. The richly detailed structure of natural language has evidently survived an evolutionary process has led some economists to argue for its importance not only to understanding grammar but also for understanding human social and economic decisions. Consequently, it has been long argued that the existence of a rich language should play a more prominent role in game theory (see Farrell, 1993). At the same time, others have demonstrated empirically that, in in contrast to situations where players can engage in limited forms of communication, efficient economic outcomes emerge more readily when players can communicate using rich natural language. Our aim here is to present and test a formal framework that predicts people both use and respond to multi-meaning natural language in a way that improves coordination.This project investigates why cheap-talk natural language communication is systematically found to promote coordination better than predetermined intention signaling. We hypothesize the reason is that, when communicating with natural language, people both use and respond to intentions and attitudes, where attitude indicates the strength of a message sender's desire to have her message followed. We test our hypothesis using controlled laboratory experiments in both the United States and China. Our preliminary data has shown (i) free-form messages do include both signaled intentions and attitudes; (ii) people respond both to intentions and attitudes when making decisions; and (iii) the use of attitude significantly improves coordination. Moreover, while males and females recognize and respond to intentions and attitude equally well, we find females are more likely to send more demanding signals than males, while males send messages focused more on the equilibrium outcome than attitude. Overall, we find that natural language communication in our environment can be well-modeled by a language that includes both intentions and attitudes. We propose to conduct more experiments to assess whether these results are robust with a variety of games and within the context of social learning environments. In particular, building on a well-established literature, we propose to test the hypothesis that natural language brings unique value beyond that which is available from knowledge of social history or narrowly constructed advice. Our research helps to identify the features of natural language communication that promote coordination, and also sheds light on the nature of communication systems that may promote efficient economic outcomes.