Group Size uncertainty in shared resource use

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Prior work on the use of shared or common resources has studied the impact of uncertainty about the amount of resource available to a group, evnironmental uncertainty, and uncertainty ablut the behavior of others, social uncertainty.This study examines yet another source of uncertainty, that pertaining to the number of participants. We call this group size uncertainty. After contrasting group size uncertainty with environmental uncertainty, we develop a prototypical situation involving multiple sources within which group size uncertainty can be studied. Equilibrium solutions based on strategic analysis are developed for simple cases and the properties of the equilibria are described. We then address the question of whether a simple trial-and-error learning process will be able to find the equilibria. The answer to this question is clearly "no". The equilibria found by the learning model are quite different not only from the strategic analysis but also from thegame theoretic Nash equilibria suggesting the need to construct a hybrid theory of trial-and-error learning and strategic perspective for predicting human behavior.