Dynamic Choice in an Uncertain World

这个项目将有助于更好地理解个人决策和“游戏”中的人类行为，也就是说，各种代理的决策可以相互作用，每个代理的收益可能取决于其他代理的行为。在个人决策的背景下，该项目有助于我们理解动态选择，特别是不确定性下的选择，其中不确定性包括对自己偏好的不确定性（对消费者来说，哪种商品最能满足他们的需求；对企业来说，他们的成本和可能的收入），对他人偏好的不确定性（例如，其他企业的成本），以及对其他代理人的计划和意图的不确定性。该项目还将扩展PI过去在诱惑和自我控制方面的工作，将习惯形成考虑在内，其理念是诱惑的数量取决于代理过去对其偏好的了解程度。在游戏设置中，该项目将研究代理人如何以及何时通过互惠合作，即使他们只是不完全观察到其他人的意图——例如，当一个朋友说他们很忙或生病，因此无法来帮助你。该项目还将开发改进的方法来预测游戏的长期均衡结果，当玩家最初不确定对手的策略并通过观察来了解他们时，这些观察只是部分的：例如，拍卖中的失败者可能会看到获胜的出价，但看不到失败的出价，并且没有观察到其他竞标者愿意支付多少钱。智力价值：关于不确定性下的选择的工作将提供动态环境下各种随机选择行为的公理化特征，包括消费者购买实证研究中常用的动态逻辑，因为这些模型中的随机选择可以被解释为代理不确定自己偏好的结果。这些理论基础将阐明规范何时可能是合理的；它们还可能导致更适合某些情况的可选的、同样易于处理的规范。习惯形成的研究将结合认知神经科学的见解，以建立更准确的模型，说明习惯是如何形成的，以及诱惑是如何扭曲经济决策的。为了理解互惠合作，该项目将使用重复囚徒困境和最后通牒游戏的实验，当预期的行动在噪音下执行时，将结果与观察到意图和行动的结果以及一次博弈的结果进行比较。这将为指导利他主义、互惠和社会偏好理论提供数据。学习对手的工作？策略将为许多现场设置和实验室实验提供更好的解决方案概念，从而为分析它们提供新的工具。更广泛的影响：该项目将加强经济理论家和对行为经济学感兴趣的实验人员之间的联系，研究决策理论的经济学家和研究需求系统估计的经济学家之间的联系，以及对成瘾、习惯形成和意志力感兴趣的经济学家和心理学家之间的联系。该基金还将为从事相关课题研究的研究生提供支持。从更长远的角度来看，我们希望拟议的研究将增强我们对互惠利他主义如何以及何时导致合作的理解；这在社会科学的许多分支中都是至关重要的，也是进化生物学的一个关键问题。

This project will help develop a better understanding of human behavior in both individual decisions and in 'games', that is, settings where the decisions of various agents can interact and each agent's payoff may depend on the actions of others. In the setting of individual decisions, the project contributes to our understanding of dynamic choice, and in particular choice under uncertainty, where uncertainty includes uncertainty about one's own preferences (for a consumer, which goods will best serve their needs; for a firm, their costs and possible revenues) as well as uncertainty about the preferences of others (e.g. the costs of other firms) and also uncertainty about the plans and intentions of other agents. The project will also extend the PI's past work on temptation and self-control to take into account habit formation, with the idea that the amount of temptation depends on what the agent has learned about his preferences in the past. In the setting of games, the project will study how and when agents manage to cooperate via reciprocation even when they only imperfectly observe the intentions of the others- as for example when a friend says they are busy or sick and thus unable to come help you. The project will also develop improved ways to predict the long-run equilibrium outcomes of a game when players are initially uncertain about their opponent's strategies and learn about them by observation, where these observations are only partial: For example a losing bidder in an auction might see the winning bid but not see the losing ones, and not observe how much the other bidders would have been willing to pay.Intellectual Merit: The work on choice under uncertainty will provide axiomatic characterizations of various sorts of stochastic choice behavior in dynamic settings, including the dynamic logit commonly used in empirical studies of consumer purchases, as the stochastic choice in these models can be interpreted as a consequence of the agent being uncertain of his or her own preferences. These theoretical foundations will shed light on when the specification is likely to be reasonable; they also may lead to alternative and equally tractable specifications that are better fits for some situations. The work on habit formation will incorporate insights from cognitive neuroscience to build more accurate models of how habits develop and how temptation distorts economics decisions. To understand reciprocal cooperation, the project will use experiments on repeated prisoner dilemma and ultimatum games when the intended actions are implemented with noise, comparing the outcomes to those when intentions as well as actions are observed, and to the outcomes in one-shot games. This will provide data to guide theories of altruism, reciprocation, and social preferences. The work on learning opponents? strategies will provide a better solution concept for many field settings and lab experiments, and thus a new tool for analyzing them.Broader Impact: The project will be strengthen ties between economic theorists and experimenters interested in behavioral economics, between economists working on decision theory and those doing estimation of demand systems, and between economists and psychologists interested in addiction, habit formation, and willpower. The grant will also provide support for graduate students doing research on related topics. Taking a longer term view, we are hopeful that the proposed research will enhance our understanding of how and when reciprocal altruism leads to cooperation; this is of fundamental importance in many branches of social science and is also a key issue in evolutionary biology.