An Experimental Study of Strategic Complementarity, Asynchronicity and Mechanism Design

这个实验经济学的研究项目将有限理性和学习纳入了机制设计框架。该项目分为两部分。第一部分包括三个关于激励相容的公共产品机制的实验研究。公共产品的存在严重挑战了分配私人产品的传统或“自然”解决方案。激励相容机制使个人的自身利益与群体利益相一致。研究者和其他人的研究表明，在这些激励兼容机制中，当参与者的策略是战略互补时，那些超模的机制可以很好地收敛到纳什均衡预测，而那些非超模的机制则不收敛。本项目考察战略互补性的程度是否会对机制的趋同产生重大影响，即趋同过程是否渐进。通过对三种不同程度战略互补性的公共产品供给超模机制进行实验，研究这种效应。收敛性是选择解决特定问题的机制的重要标准，因为在学习过程结束时，我们希望该机制产生期望的结果。第二部分是基于分布式系统（如Internet）的机制设计实验研究，该系统具有异步性和有限信息的特点。在各种各样的现实世界中，一组智能体共享一个共同的生产过程，将输入转化为输出。互联网是一个突出的例子，它在全球电信中变得越来越重要。在多个代理共享一个网络链路的情况下，共享的代价是经历拥塞。在网络环境中，传统的解决方案概念，如纳什均衡或序列非支配集可能不适用。Friedman和Shenker（1998）为分布式系统提出了新的解决方案概念。这个项目运行实验来检验这些新的解决方案概念。本项目还通过实验研究了完全信息和同步移动以及有限信息和不同程度异步的分布式设置下的平均成本定价和串行成本分担机制。这项研究将提供在分布式系统中应该选择哪种类型的机制的信息。

This program of research in experimental economics incorporates bounded rationality and learning into the mechanism design framework. The project has two parts. The first consists of three experimental studies of incentive-compatible public goods mechanisms. The presence of public goods seriously challenges traditional or "natural" solutions for the allocation of private goods. Incentive-compatible mechanisms align individual self-interests with the group interest. The investigator's previous work and others' work have shown that among these incentive compatible mechanisms those which are supermodular, i.e., when players' strategies are strategic complements, converge robustly well to the Nash equilibrium prediction, and those which are not supermodular do not converge as well. This project examines whether the degree of strategic complementarity could have a significant effect on the convergence of a mechanism, i.e., whether the process is gradual. Experiments are conducted on three supermodular mechanisms for public goods provision with varying degrees of strategic complementarity to study this effect. Convergence is an important criterion for selecting a mechanism to solve a particular problem because at the end of the learning process we would like the mechanism to yield the desired outcome.The second part consists of two experimental studies of mechanism design in distributed systems, such as the Internet, which are characterized by asynchronicity and limited information. In a wide variety of real world situations a group of agents share a common production process transforming input into output. A salient example is provided by the Internet, which has becoming increasingly important in global telecommunications. In the context of several agents sharing a network link, the cost to be shared is congestion experienced. In the network context, traditional solution concepts such as Nash equilibrium or the serially undominated set might not apply. Friedman and Shenker (1998) propose new solution concepts for distributed systems. This project runs experiments to examine these new solution concepts. The project also conducts experiments to study the average cost pricing and the serial cost sharing mechanisms under complete information and synchronous moves, as well as distributed settings with limited information and varying degrees of asynchrony. This study will provide information on what types of mechanisms should be selected in distributed systems.