DHB Games Theory, Culture, and Institutional Path Dependence.

文化位于制度和经济或政治成就之间，影响业绩。无论是横向地看各国，还是纵向地看时间，一个教训是明确的：市场、民主和法律制度等制度的有效性取决于行为，特别是人们相互合作和信任的倾向。因此，制度绩效理论必须与文化结合起来。我们通过对传统博弈论方法的修改来应对这一挑战。博弈论是分析机构的首选正式框架，它假设孤立的、上下文无关的战略环境和其中的最优行为。因此，博弈论似乎无法解释我们认为是文化的模式化的、背景的、有时是次优的行为，更不用说它跨越空间和时间的出现和持续了。我们已经开发了一种方法来研究人们如何同时对多种制度环境做出反应-游戏--(因此有了博弈论的绰号)。初步模型表明，当有目的的、受激励驱动的代理人同时面对多种战略情况时，当认知努力代价高昂时，可能会出现不同的文化行为，而且是不可避免的。因此，第二个目标是揭示新机构的加入-包括时机和与其他机构的合并-可能会影响文化，创造一个更有利可图、更和平的氛围。本研究由四个部分组成。首先，研究人员构建了产生文化行为的基于主体的博弈论模型。其次，他们在人类受试者身上进行实验，以证实这些基于代理的模型。第三，他们定义了一个分类，以澄清和完善什么是路径依赖，突出了依赖于历史路径的过程和只依赖于一组历史事件而不是其顺序的过程之间的区别。第四，他们构建了一个基于代理的模型，测试是否出现路径依赖，然后他们还用人类受试者进行测试。这项研究工作汇集了一位受过制度研究培训的政治学家、一位将数学模型和基于代理的模型联系起来的复杂系统学者，以及一位专门研究学习和公共经济学的实验和理论经济学家。这三名研究人员都精通博弈论，博弈论将作为各种方法之间的翻译语言。

Culture sits between institutions and economic or political achievement, affecting performance. Whether looking horizontally across countries or vertically through time, one lesson is clear: the efficacy of institutions such as markets, democracies, and legal systems hinges upon behavior, particularly on the tendency for people to cooperate with and trust one another. A theory of institutional performance, therefore, must come to grips with culture. We meet this challenge with a modification of the traditional game-theoretic approach. Game theory, the preferred formal framework for analyzing institutions, assumes isolated, context-free strategic environments and optimal behavior within them. Thus, game theory would seem to be at a loss to explain the patterned, contextual, and sometimes suboptimal behavior we think of as culture, let alone its emergence and persistence across space and time. We have developed a method to examine how people respond to multiple institutional environments---games---simultaneously (hence the games theory moniker). Preliminary models suggest that when purposeful, incentive-driven agents confront multiple strategic situations simultaneously and when cognitive effort is costly, culturally distinct behavior may emerge and be unavoidable. Therefore, a second goal is to uncover how the addition of new institutions---including timing and combinations with other institutions---may affect culture, creating a more profitable and peaceful climate. The proposed research consists of four parts. First, the researchers construct agent based and game theoretic models that produce cultural behavior. Second, they conduct experiments with human subjects to corroborate those agent based models. Third, they define a classification to clarify and refine what is meant by path dependence, highlighting a distinction between processes that depend on the path of history and processes that depend only on the set of historical events but not their order. Fourth, they construct an agent based model that tests whether path dependence emerges that they then also test with human subjects. This research effort brings together a political scientist trained in the study of institutions, a complex systems scholar who connects mathematical and agent based models, and an experimental and theoretical economist who specializes in learning and public economics. All three investigators are well versed in game theory which will serve as a translating language between the various methodologies applied.