Enhancing Human Economic Performance

实地观察已经确立了互惠互利的经济行为的普遍性，实验研究表明，这种行为在受控的实验室环境中是稳健的。不幸的是，基于个人自身利益的非合作行为可能会破坏基于信任的交换。因此，人类不断面临着寻找可靠程序以致力于互惠互利交流的问题。一个重要的问题是，什么样的社会制度能促进基于信任的交换。 该项目研究了信任关系对个人和非个人交换环境中市场绩效的影响。在这些实验中，在两个签约机构中的每一个中考虑两种处理。第一种制度，即双边谈判，是相对个人的。第二种制度是双向拍卖，它更客观，涉及多边谈判规则，允许通过公开观察的买卖价差进行买卖。两种处理方法是手动合同执行，其中受试者必须选择完成他们的合同，以及自动执行，其中合同通过实验软件立即执行。目标是调查信任关系的破裂是否以及如何导致市场失灵，以及这种失灵是否与契约制度有关。在过去的十年里，实验室实验，通过博弈论家、实验经济学家、经济历史学家、进化心理学家和社会学家的工作，帮助发展了考虑经济行为的生态合理性的理论;特别是当人类从小群体的个人交换转变为大群体的非个人交换时，激励方式发生了变化。这一提议描述了一系列新的实验，这些实验研究了在向非人格化交换过渡的过程中，人类在市场中的表现是如何失败的。理解人类的经济表现如何依赖于信任关系，并找到有助于促进和维持这种基于信任的表现的程序，对整个社会越来越重要。一个重要的原因是，许多人预计在线市场将成为未来几十年经济增长的引擎，但正如本文所建议的研究将表明的那样，这些市场可能会因为信任失败而失败。特别是，网上市场的买方和卖方必须与他们所知甚少的对应方进行交易，例如，不值得信赖的买方可能不交付付款，或者不值得信赖的卖方可能不交付预期的产品。这些可能性是真实的：2000年，在全国消费者联盟收到的所有互联网欺诈投诉中，与在线市场有关的投诉占78%。 本提案中提出的研究是朝着更好地理解人在市场中的表现与信任之间的联系迈出的一步，并就如何设计市场制度提供了见解，这些制度有助于防止由于信任失败而导致的市场失败，从而成为未来经济增长的催化剂。

Field observations have established the ubiquity of mutually beneficial, reciprocity based economic behavior, and experimental research has demonstrated that such behavior is robust to controlled laboratory environments. Unfortunately, non-cooperative behavior founded in individual self-interest can corrupt trust-based exchange. Consequently, humans continually face the problem of finding credible procedures to commit to reciprocal, mutually beneficial exchanges. An important question is what kinds of social institutions enhance trust-based exchange. The project examines the implications of trust relationships for market performancein both personal and impersonal exchange settings. In these experiments, two treatments are considered in each of two contracting institutions. The first institution, bilateral bargaining, is relatively personal. The second institution, a double auction, is more impersonal and involves multilateral negotiation rules that allow buying and selling through a publicly observed bid-ask spread. The two treatments are manual contract execution, where a subject must choose to complete their contract, and automatic execution, where contracts are executed immediately through the experimental software. The goal is to investigate whether and how breakdowns in trust relationships can lead to market failure, and whether this failure is related to contracting institutions.Over the last ten years laboratory experiments, informed by the work of game theorists, experimental economists, economic historians, evolutionary psychologists, and sociologists, have helped to develop theories that take account of the ecological rationality of economic behavior; and particularly the way incentives have changed as humans moved from small group personal exchange to large group impersonal exchange. This proposal describes a number of new experiments that examine how the way in which human performance in markets can fail during a transition to impersonal exchange.Understanding how human economic performance relies on trust relationships, and finding procedures that help to facilitate and sustain this trust-based performance, is increasingly important to society at large. One important reason is that online markets are expected by many to be an engine of economic growth over the next few decades, but as the research suggested herein will make clear, these markets can potentially fail because of failures of trust. In particular, buyers and sellers in online markets must transact with counterparts about whom they know very little, and, for example, an untrustworthy buyer might not deliver payment, or an untrustworthy seller might not deliver an expected product. These possibilities are real: complaints relating to online markets accounted for 78 percent of all Internet fraud complaints received by the National Consumers League in 2000. Research presented in this proposal represents a step towards better understanding the link between human performance in markets and trust, and provides insights on how to design market institutions that help to prevent market failures due to trust failures, and that consequently act as catalysts for future economic growth.