Rational Institutions for Nonrational Agents

小行星9514809 提案中所描述的研究与这样一种观点相联系：即使个体参与者是有限理性的，聪明设计的机构也可能表现良好，衡量一个机构成功的标准是当代理人犯错误时它的表现如何。 该提案包括几个相关项目。 一个项目研究拍卖机制，以扩展其他人提出的想法，即这些市场不依赖于优化行为来有效运作。 我们的目标是证明，价格收敛到竞争力的价格时，参与者的预算限制，但不成熟，并确定一类内部一致的，自适应的行为，在复杂的拍卖环境中产生有效的结果。 另一个项目分析了二维输出的机制设计问题，以确定观察一个组件的能力如何影响第二个组件的产品。 两项研究关注的是信息不灵通的代理人和专家之间的关系。 一个模型描述了一个市场的功能，其中代理人必须选择一个专家，无论是通过广告或口碑提供的信息。 另一个是研究有限理性代理人何时应该将决策权委托给专家。 在大多数情况下，这些技术是来自博弈论和机制设计理论的标准工具;特别是，不完整的信息将是代理人无法做出完美决策的主要原因。

9514809 Sobel The studies described in the proposal are linked by the idea that intelligently designed institutions may perform well even if individual participants are boundedly rational, and that a measure of an institution's success is how well it performs when agents make mistakes. The proposal contains several related projects. One project studies auction mechanisms to extend the ideas, introduced by others, that these markets do not rely on optimizing behavior to operate efficiently. The goal is to prove that prices converge to the competitive price when participants are budget constrained but unsophisticated, and to identify a class of internally consistent, adaptive behaviors that generate efficient outcomes in complicated auction environments. Another project analyzes a mechanism design problem with two-dimensional output in order to determine how the ability to observe one component influences the product of the second. Two studies focus on the relationship between poorly informed agents and experts. One model describes the function of a market in which agents must select an expert, either from information supplied through advertisements or word of mouth. The other investigates when a boundedly rational agent should delegate decision making authority to an expert. For the most part, the techniques are standard tools from game theory and the theory of mechanism design; in particular, incomplete information will be the primary reason that agents cannot make perfect decisions.