Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: Regret in Games: When It Is Not (Only) Your Fault

这个项目处于经济学和心理学的交叉点。它将研究在人们战略性地相互作用的情况下，后悔和责备的感觉是如何塑造人类行为的，这样每个人的福利也取决于他人的行为。它提出，当人们感到对一个糟糕的结果负有责任时，他们会后悔自己的行为。另一方面，当他们认为其他人应该对糟糕的结果负责时，他们会责怪他们。这个项目将研究后悔和责备之间的紧张关系如何影响行为和经济结果。该项目将（i）强调在经济模型中考虑情绪的重要性，（ii）加强我们对由于责任分工而导致合作减少和低效率结果的环境的理解，（iii）产生一种以前不存在的数据类型，供其他经济学和心理学研究人员使用。这项拟议的工作将研究游戏中的遗憾。它将提出一个理论，其中战略互动代理人做出选择，同时考虑到物质回报和遗憾，他们的选择可能会产生。该理论解释了参与者的（预期的）后悔程度（对于她在游戏中的行为和她的结果收益）如何受到参与者之间对游戏结果的责任划分的影响。这是第一个考虑后悔的战略形式的工作，因为早期的作品分析了后悔，好像在一个单一的代理人的情况下，对手的行动被视为世界的状态。直觉如下。在决策理论的背景下，结果完全是决策者（DM）选择和“运气”（世界最初未知的状态）的结果。由于DM对结果的影响力，遗憾的感觉自然会出现。另一方面，博弈的结果是多个主体策略互动的结果。因此，假设一个玩家可能不会（期望）体验到相同程度的后悔感，因为她可能会觉得对所有玩家行为的综合结果不那么负责。具体来说，它是提出了一个球员的遗憾往往会出现时，她选择的行动被证明是次优后，其他球员的行动被揭露。然而，如果其他玩家也可以选择不同的方式（让每个人都更好），因为部分责任归咎于他们，她的遗憾就会减轻。该项目将从理论和实验两方面研究这种遗憾和责备的考虑如何影响经济结果，以及考虑这些考虑是否会导致理论预测更接近实验结果。该项目将有三个主要好处。首先，它将有助于我们理解在何种情况下责任和责备的归属会影响战略互动的结果。它还将帮助我们了解这种影响是增加还是破坏福利，并衡量影响的程度。其次，当选择模型应用于游戏时，它将强调修改选择模型所带来的好处，从而为理论工作提供信息。最后，它将产生其他研究人员可以使用的关于游戏中遗憾和责备的实验数据。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project lies at the interface of economics and psychology. It will examine how feelings of regret and blame shape human behavior in situations where people interact strategically so that each person’s welfare also depends on the actions of others. It poses that people regret their actions when they feel responsible for a bad outcome. On the other hand, they blame other people when they believe them to be responsible for the bad outcome. This project will examine how this tension between regret and blame affects behavior and economic outcomes. The project will (i) emphasize the importance of accounting for emotions in economic models, (ii) enhance our understanding of environments where reduced cooperation and inefficient outcomes may arise due to division of responsibility, and (iii) produce a previously nonexistent type of data that other researchers in economics and psychology can use.This proposed work will examine regret in games. It will propose a theory where strategically-interacting agents make choices taking into account both material payoffs and the regret that their choices may generate. This theory accounts for how the magnitude of a player’s (anticipated) regret (for her action in a game and her resulting payoff) is affected by the division of responsibility between the players for the outcome of the game. This is the first work to consider a strategic form of regret, since earlier works have analyzed regret as if in a single-agent context with the opponents’ actions treated as the state of the world. The intuition is as follows. In a decision-theoretic context an outcome is exclusively a result of the decision-maker’s (DM) choice and ”luck” (the at first unknown state of the world). Feelings of regret can naturally arise given the power the DM has over the outcome. On the other hand, the outcome of a game is the result of the strategic interaction of multiple agents. Thus, it is postulated that a player may not (expect to) experience feelings of regret to the same degree, as she may feel less responsible for the combined result of all the players’ actions. Specifically, it is posed that a player’s regret tends to arise when her chosen action is proven sub-optimal after the other players’ actions are revealed. However, her regret is mitigated if it is also revealed that the other players could have chosen differently (making everyone better off), as part of the blame is attributed to them. The project will examine both theoretically and experimentally how such regret and blame considerations affect economic outcomes and whether accounting for these consideration leads to theoretical predictions closer to experimental findings. The project will have three main benefits. First, it will contribute to our understanding of the circumstances under which attribution of responsibility and blame can affect outcomes of strategic interactions. It will also help us understand whether this effect will be welfare enhancing or damaging, and gauge the magnitude of the effect. Second, it will inform theoretical work by emphasizing the gains from modifications to models of choice when those are applied in games. Last, it will produce experimental data on regret and blame in games that other researchers can use.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.