Experience and Expertise in Strategic Behavior

近年来，实验方法已成为经济研究中不可或缺的组成部分。实验室实验被用来检验经济理论，发现可供选择的制度规则的性质，并帮助设计新的市场制度。几个例子是FCC频谱拍卖的设计，为医学实习生与医院匹配的新市场机构的设计，以及为放松电力分配而设计的新市场机构的设计。经济学和博弈论的实验室实验建立在“转移”或“并行”的前提下：即实验中主体的行为将与实际战略遭遇中的人的行为相同的假设，这些实验旨在帮助我们理解。无论出于何种原因，如果实验对象的行为不同，这将给实验研究带来挑战：在实验室失败的理论可能在该领域表现良好，反之亦然；实验室交易规则的性质可能与其在该领域的性质不同；在实验室设计并在那里运作良好的交易规则可能在该领域表现不佳。最近的证据表明，在某些类型的战略情况下，拥有专业知识的人的行为可能与那些“新手”的行为不同，就像实验室的受试者通常在给定的战略背景下几乎没有经验或没有经验一样。这些证据包括Walker和Wooders最近的研究，在这些研究中，发现领先的职业网球运动员做出的战略决定比实验室受试者在战略环境中没有经验的决定更不符合战略行为理论。研究项目包括一些实验，旨在研究专家的战略行为是否以及如何与经验较少和专家较少的决策者的行为不同。这些实验将主要在万维网上进行，它们将专门设计来提供不同水平的专业知识的开发和识别，以及识别与不同专业水平相关的行为差异的方法。这项研究的结果有望更好地理解专业知识在战略行为中的作用，以及预期并行可以保持的战略背景，并帮助确定基于网络的实验在哪些环境下更好，在哪些环境下实验室实验可能更好。

In recent years experimental methods have become an indispensable component ofeconomic research. Laboratory experiments are used to test economic theory, to discoverthe properties of alternative institutional rules, and to assist in the design of new marketinstitutions. A few examples are the design of the FCC spectrum auctions, the design of anew market institution for matching medical interns with hospitals, and the design of newmarket institutions for the deregulated allocation of electrical power.Laboratory experiments in economics and game theory rest on the premise of"transference", or"parallelism:" the assumption that the behavior of subjects in thelaboratory will be the same as the behavior of people in the actual strategic encountersthat the experiments are designed to help us understand. If laboratory subjects behavedifferently, for whatever reason, this would present a challenge for experimentalresearch: theory that failed in the laboratory might perform well in the field, or vice-versa;the properties of a trading rule in the laboratory might be different from itsproperties in the field; and trading rules designed in the laboratory, and which work wellthere, may perform poorly in the field.Recent evidence suggests that the behavior of people with expertise in certain kinds ofstrategic situations may be different than the behavior of people who are "inovices," aslaboratory subjects typically are, with little or no experience in the given strategiccontext. This evidence includes recent research by Walker and Wooders in which leadingprofessional tennis players were found to make strategic decisions that were more inaccord with the theory of strategic behavior than the decisions of laboratory subjects whohad no prior experience in the strategic situation.The research project consists of experiments designed to study whether, and how, thestrategic behavior of experts differs from the behavior of less experienced and less expertdecision makers. The experiments will be conducted primarily on the World Wide Web,and they will be designed specifically to provide for the development and identificationof varying levels of expertise and the means to identify differences in behavior that areassociated with differing levels of expertise.The results of this research promise to provide a better understanding of the role ofexpertise in strategic behavior and of the strategic contexts in which parallelism can beexpected to hold, and to help identify the settings in which Web-based experiments aresuperior and those in which laboratory experiments are likely to be superior.