Selection Pressure in Strategic Environments

自人类诞生以来，面对生死（生存斗争）对稀缺资源的竞争就形成了社会和经济互动。这项研究首次在受控战略决策实验中引入了选择压力，该实验使用基于绩效的参与者随时间的替换。这些研究为现实生活中的人类决策者在面对进化竞争时如何管理短期与长期战略权衡提供了独特的见解。通过比较两种处理条件，评估了选择压力对战略决策的影响。在选择压力条件下，参与者的生存（和回报）取决于他们相对于其他参与者的表现。每隔一段时间就会对员工的表现进行评估，薪酬较低的员工更有可能被经验不足的新人取代。在无压力的控制条件下，选择参与者进行移除的频率与选择压力情况下相同，但移除是随机的，而不是基于相对表现。这个实验设计使选择压力对行为的影响的因果识别成为可能。在三种著名的经济应用中考虑了战略决策，每种都有和没有选择压力。第一个应用是重复图洛克式的寻租竞赛。实验利用选择压力从经验上分离进化适应和不适应的心理机制，这些机制被提出来解释之前缺乏选择压力的竞赛实验中选手的激烈竞争行为。第二个应用涉及不断发展的规范和社会变革。利用重复协调博弈中的选择压力，研究了实验均衡选择中短期风险和长期收益如何导致路径依赖。最后一个应用是讨价还价。在重复的纳什需求博弈中，该研究探讨了相对于之前没有选择压力的实验结果，选择压力是否有助于提高议价惯例的效率。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Competition for scarce resources in the face of birth and death (the struggle for survival) has shaped social and economic interaction since the very beginnings of mankind. This research is the first to induce selection pressure in controlled strategic decision-making experiments using performance-based replacement of participants over time. The studies advance unique insights into how real-life human decision makers manage short- versus long-term strategic tradeoffs in the face of evolutionary competition. The effect of selection pressure on strategic decision-making is assessed by comparing two treatment conditions. In the selection pressure condition participants' survival (and payoffs) depend on their performance relative to that of other participants. Performance is evaluated every few periods and participants earning low payoffs relative to their peers are more likely to be replaced by new, inexperienced performers. In the control, no pressure condition, participants are selected for removal with the same frequency as under the selection pressure situation, but removal is random rather than based on relative performance. This experimental design enables the causal identification of the effects of selection pressure on behavior.Strategic decision-making is considered in three well-known economic applications, each with and without selection pressure. The first application is to repeated Tullock-type rent seeking contests. The experiment uses selection pressure to empirically separate evolutionary adaptive and maladaptive psychological mechanisms that have been proposed to explain the intensely competitive behavior of contestants in previous contest experiments that lacked selection pressure. The second application concerns evolving norms and social change. Selection pressure in repeated coordination games is used to study how short-term risks and long-term gains lead to path-dependencies in experimental equilibrium selection. The final application is to bargaining. In repeated Nash Demand games, the study addresses whether selection pressure helps increase the efficiency of bargaining conventions relative to results from previous experiments without selection pressure.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.