Collaborative Research: The Evolution of Conventions in Intergenerational Games

项目摘要这是一个与Barry Sopher合作的项目，9709079。该项目包括一项关于社会习俗及其所包含的信息是如何在几代社会代理人之间创建和传递的实验性调查。博弈论中的一大篇文献考察了一组固定和不变的玩家进行的无限重复的博弈。在现实世界中，虽然游戏可能会无限期地进行，但玩游戏的代理人的生命是有限的。当这些代理人去世或退休时，他们在这些无限生命的游戏中的角色由其他代理人接替，这些代理人可能会与他们的前任协商，在他们之后继续玩这个游戏。我们考察了从一代人到另一代人的过渡，在这种过渡中，惯例和规范要么被传承，要么被打破并建立新的。我们使用另一种进化模型--拉马克模型来解释社会进化过程，这与更常见的达尔文模型形成了鲜明对比。在这个拉马克过程中，一代人获得的行为惯例可以有意识地传递给下一代人，因此这里不再需要达尔文模型中相对机械的随机匹配和复制者动力学特征。我们期待这里提出的工作将增加关于社会制度的越来越多的文献，并提供一个现实的框架，在其中研究重复博弈中的进化问题。所有进行的实验都有相同的总体结构。受试者从本科生群体中招募，并被分成几代人，在这些代人中，每一代人都会在预先指定的时间长度内与相同的对手重复玩一场预先指定的游戏。在参与游戏的不同时间，他们被要求预测对手采取的行动，以便洞察对对手的信念如何随着时间的推移而变化，并寻找跨代信仰的趋同，作为习俗出现的证据。在他们参与游戏后，受试者被下一代取代，他们能够查看在他们之前发生的事情的一些历史。这段历史可能是他们在实验中的前辈的历史，也可能是他们之前所有受试者的整个历史。每一代人的受试者都能够向他们的继任者提供建议，要么建议一个正式的战略，要么简单地写下应该做什么的建议，并解释为什么会给出这样的建议。任何受试者的收益都等于那一代人在他们有生之年获得的收益加上贴现收益，这取决于他们的继任者所获得的收益。对使用这种非重叠世代设计的四个不同游戏的行为进行了调查。被调查的四个游戏包括协调游戏(性别之战)、公平因素重要的游戏(最后通牒讨价还价游戏)、信任游戏和个人学习任务。

Project Summary This is a collaborative project with Barry Sopher, 9709079. This project consists of an experimental investigation of how social conventions and the information contained in them are created and passed on between generations of social agents. A large literature in game theory examines infinitely repeated games played by a set of fixed and unchanging players. In the real world, while games may go on indefinitely, the agents who play them have finite lives. When these agents die or retire, their roles in these infinitely-lived games are taken by other agents who, perhaps in consultation with their predecessors, continue to play the game after them. We examine the transition from one generation to another, where conventions and norms are either passed along, or are disrupted and new ones established. We do so using an alternative evolutionary model, the Lamarckian model, in contrast to the more common Darwinian model, to explain the process of social evolution. In this Lamarckian process conventions of behavior acquired by one generation can be consciously passed on to the next, so that the relatively mechanical random matching and replicator dynamics characteristic of Darwinian models are no longer needed here. We expect that the work proposed here to add to the growing body of literature on social institutions, as well as provide a realistic framework within which to study the problem of evolution in repeated games. All the experiments performed have the same general structure. Subjects are recruited from undergraduate populations and ordered into generations in which each generation plays a pre-specified game repeatedly, with the same opponent, for a pre-specified length of time. During their participation in the game, at various times, they are asked to predict the actions taken by their opponent in order to obtain insight into how beliefs about one's opponent change over time, and to look for convergence in beliefs across generations as proof of the emergence of conventions. After their participation in the game subjects are replaced by a next generation, who are able to view some history of what has transpired before them. This history might either be that of their immediate predecessors in the experiment or the entire history of all subjects before them. Subjects in each generation are able to give advice to their successors either in the form of suggesting a formal strategy or simply writing down a suggestion as to what to do and explaining why such advice is being given. The payoffs to any subject are equal to the payoffs earned by that generation during their lifetime plus a discounted payoff which depends on the payoffs achieved by their successors. Behavior in four different games using this non-overlapping-generations design are investigated. The four games investigated include a coordination game (the Battle of the Sexes), a game where equity considerations are important (the Ultimatum bargaining game), a game of trust, and an individual learning task.