Collaborative Research: Individual and Team Behavior in Strategic Interactions

经济学家使用博弈论（战略互动理论）来研究各种各样的政策问题，例如如何防止大公司之间的勾结，如何设计各种目的的拍卖（例如电波权），以及如何限制功能失调的现象，如银行挤兑和市场恐慌。 在许多这样的环境中，决策是由团队而不是个人做出的--比如大公司的董事会、国会委员会等等--但在战略互动中，团队做出的决策与个人做出的决策有何不同，人们对此知之甚少。该项目的研究人员将进行精心设计的实验，以确定群体如何同意与其他群体合作，群体在产生更有效结果方面比个人表现得更好（或更差）的机制，并比较群体，而不是个人，如何从过去的经验中学习在相关情况下做出选择。 更好地理解团队如何做出决策，以及这些决策与个人决策的不同之处，将有助于对博弈论的基础理解。就更广泛的影响而言，这项研究将使经济学家能够更好地预测实体的行为，当这些实体的决策是由团队而不是个人做出的时候。 心理学家研究惯犯？的困境游戏通常会发现，团队合作比个人，称为？不连续效应？ Kagel和McGee（2016）未能发现团队之间没有沟通的重复超级游戏的不连续性效应。实验涉及多次重复PD游戏与概率停止规则将运行与没有对手之间的通信，以了解为什么群体似乎不合作的个人在某些设置，但不是在其他人。 第二组实验将探讨团队与个人在协调博弈中达到有效结果的相对有效性，其中有效均衡是相当具有挑战性的。 最后一组实验将考察团队和个人在感知不同类型游戏相似性的程度上是否存在差异。

Economists use game theory (the theory of strategic interactions) to study a wide variety of policy issues such as how to prevent collusion between large firms, how to design auctions for various purposes (e.g. air wave rights), and how to limit dysfunctional phenomena such as bank runs and market panics. In many of these settings, decisions are made by teams rather than individuals - the board of a large corporation, a congressional committee, etc. - but relatively little is known about how decisions made by teams differ from individuals in strategic interactions. Researchers on this project will conduct carefully designed experiments to identify how groups agree to cooperate with other groups, the mechanism by which groups perform better (or worse) than individuals at generating more efficient outcomes, and to compare how groups, as opposed to individuals, learn to make choices in related situations from past experience. Better understanding how teams make decisions, and how these decisions differ from ones made by individuals, will contribute to foundational understanding of game theory. In terms of broader impacts, this research will enable economists to better predict behavior of entities when the decisions of those entities are made by teams rather than individuals. Psychologists studying repeated prisoner?s dilemma games typically find that teams are less cooperative than individuals, referred to as the ?discontinuity effect?. Kagel and McGee (2016) fail to find a discontinuity effect across finitely repeated super-games with no communication between teams. Experiments involving multiple plays of repeated PD games with a probabilistic stopping rule will be run with and without communication between opponents to understand why groups seem less cooperative that individuals in some setting but not in others. A second set of experiment will explore the relative efficacy of communication for teams vs. individuals in reaching the efficient outcome in a coordination game where the efficient equilibrium is quite challenging. A final set of experiments will examine whether teams and individuals differ in the extent to which they perceive different types of games as similar.