The Sealed-Bid Mechanism & Bargaining Under Incomplete Information

激励这项研究的问题之一是如何在不完全信息下合理地构建讨价还价。在所谓的“转移价格问题”的背景下，自然会出现这样的问题，即为从一个公司的一个部门转移到另一个部门的商品和服务的定价机制的设计问题。这种情况的一个典型特征是，有关数据，例如供应商部门的成本和客户部门的利益，对参与者来说并不是很清楚。例如，供应商比客户更了解供应商的成本，客户比供应商更了解客户的利益，这是正常的。这一研究项目继续并扩大了两名调查员以前就密封投标谈判机制所做的工作。密封投标程序是不完全信息下的一种广泛使用的构造讨价还价的方法，因为它具有简单的线性均衡和理想的福利性质。不幸的是，有无数的其他均衡具有从次优到零的福利属性。作为一个实际问题，这种机制并不是很有吸引力，因为不能保证“好的”均衡将从存在的无限其他均衡中挑选出来。研究人员对密封投标机制进行了第一次对照实验室实验。他们证明，在密封投标机制下进行讨价还价的买家和卖家平均选择了简单、线性的竞价策略，这会导致“良好的”均衡。这个项目致力于解决由这些实验提出的一些重要的悬而未决的问题。例如，随着实验范围的扩大，究竟是什么原因导致了阶梯函数式竞价行为的出现？我们如何解释这些实验中买家和卖家的不对称行为？为什么非结构化的面对面讨价还价比所有其他形式的讨价还价都要好？“廉价谈判”，即对最终谈判没有任何约束性影响的谈判，会影响进程的结果吗？该项目为我们理解讨价还价行为做出了重大的方法论和实质性贡献。在方法论上，它证明了常用的实验做法，如识别买家和卖家或重复实验少量次是否会对讨价还价实验的结果产生偏差。实质上，它严格地推导并实验检验在不完全信息下投标行为中是否存在规律性或“规律”。

The problem motivating this research is one of how to properly structure bargaining under incomplete information. Such a problem arises naturally in the context of the so-called "transfer price problem," i.e., the problem of designing mechanisms for the pricing of goods and services that are transferred from one division of a firm to another. A typical feature of this situation is that the relevant data, e.g., the costs of the supplier division and the benefits of the customer division, are not well known to the participants. For example, it would be normal for the supplier's costs to be better known to the supplier than the customer, and for the customer's benefits to be better known to the customer than the supplier. This research project continues and extends work undertaken previously by the two investigators on sealed-bid mechanisms for bargaining. The sealed-bid procedure is one widely used method for structuring bargaining under incomplete information because it has a simple linear equilibrium with desirable welfare properties. Unfortunately, there are an infinite number of other equilibria with welfare properties that range from second-best optimal to zero. As a practical matter, this mechanism is not very appealing, since there is no guarantee that the "good" equilibrium will be picked out of the infinity of other equilibria that exist. The investigators conducted the first controlled laboratory experiments on the sealed-bid mechanism. They demonstrated that buyers and sellers bargaining under a sealed-bid mechanism on average chose the simple, linear bidding strategies that resulted in "good" equilibria. This project pursues a number of important unresolved questions raised by these experiments. For instance, what exactly account for the emergence of step-function-like bidding behavior as the horizon of the experiment increases? How can we account for the asymmetrical behavior of the buyers and sellers in these experiments? Why did unstructured face-to-face bargaining perform better than all other forms of bargaining? Does "cheap talk," i.e., talk that does not have any binding impact on the eventual negotiations, influence the outcome of the process? The project makes significant methodological and substantive contributions to our understanding of bargaining behavior. Methodologically, it demonstrates whether commonly used experimental practices such as identifying buyers and sellers or repeating the experiment a small number of times bias the results of bargaining experiments. Substantively, it derives rigorously and tests experimentally for the presence of regularities or "laws" in bidding behavior under incomplete information.