Laboratory Studies of Collective Decision Making

商业、经济和政治中的重大决策往往来自于某种集体选择过程。 股东批准合并，联邦公开市场委员会设定利率，公民选举总统。 最近的理论工作增加了许多理想的现实主义集体决策模型，包括重要的功能，如审议，谨慎，和昂贵的信息获取。 该提案描述了一系列实验来测试这些新提出的理论。 实验被设计成对决策中可能的偏差敏感（例如，顺从行为）和信息处理（例如，选择性曝光）。 因此，研究结果将建议如何通过将行为方面纳入集体选择问题的分析来丰富标准的理性选择范式。 当信息是外生确定的，所提出的实验包括几个新的特征，例如，在可能存在相互冲突的偏好的情况下，对广泛的投票制度（包括多数和多数）进行比较。 此外，本研究还评估了审议和审议对集体成果的影响。 该项目还启动了一系列的实验室探索时，信息是从内部收集的。 这一部分将对机构之间的相互作用、获取信息的动机以及由此产生的集体决策过程的质量产生经验性的见解。 这些实验是建立在投票行为的经济分析前沿的理论模型上的，有待于彻底的实证研究。 使用显示偏好的方法，使研究人员能够确定重要的行为因素密切相关的集体决策。实证方法采用的中心周围的量子响应平衡，一个新的框架，允许一定程度的“噪音”的选择。 这种方法正越来越多地用于分析实验数据，并允许结构估计未观察到的偏好和个人heterogeneity.The更广泛的影响，从拟议的活动所产生的包括机会，改善集体选择程序时，参与和信息收集是昂贵的。 关于协商如何影响制度成果的研究结果可以为协商民主的政治和哲学理论提供基础。 此外，用于研究沟通的实验方法可能会蔓延到其他方面，如拍卖和机制设计。 更广泛的影响包括两个额外的贡献：jVote的开发，一个用于运行投票实验的开源Java程序，以及将在加州理工学院举行的一系列小型会议。 基于网络的jVote将有助于将实验方法传播给广大的经济学家和政治学家，包括那些没有物理实验室的人。 小型会议将有助于加强理论与经济学之间以及经济学与政治学之间的对话。

Major decisions in business, economics, and politics often result from some collective choice process. Shareholders approve mergers, the Federal Open Market Committee sets interest rates, and citizens elect their president. Recent theoretical work has added much desired realism to models of collective decision making by including important features such as deliberation, abstention, and costly information acquisition. This proposal describes an array of experiments to test these newly proposed theories. The experiments are designed to be sensitive to possible biases in decision making (e.g., conformist behavior) and information processing (e.g., selective exposure). As such, the results will suggest ways to enrich the standard rational choice paradigm by admitting behavioral aspects into the analysis of collective choice problems.This study is broadly divided into two parts. When information is exogenously determined the proposed experiments include several novel features, e.g., the comparison of a wide range of voting institutions (including majority and unanimity) in the presence of possibly conflicting preferences. In addition, this study evaluates the impact of deliberation and abstention on collective outcomes. The project also initiates a sequence of laboratory explorations when information is endogenously collected. This part will generate empirical insights about the interaction between institutions, the incentives to acquire information and the quality of the resulting collective decision process.The intellectual merit of the proposed activity is manifold. The experiments are founded on theoretical models at the frontier of economic analysis of voting behavior, awaiting a thorough empirical investigation. Using a revealed preference approach allows the researchers to identify important behavioral elements germane to collective decision making. The empirical methods employed center around the Quantal Response Equilibrium, a novel framework allowing for some degree of "noise" in choices. This approach is being increasingly used to analyze experimental data and permits structural estimation of unobserved preferences and individual heterogeneity.The broader impacts resulting from the proposed activity include the opportunity for improving collective choice procedures when participation and information collection is costly. The findings about how deliberation affects institutional outcomes could provide foundations for the political and philosophical theories of deliberative democracy. Furthermore, the experimental methodology used to study communication could spill over to other contexts such as auctions and mechanism design at large. The broader impacts include two additional contributions: the development of jVote, an open-source Java program for running voting experiments, and a sequence of mini-conferences to be held at Caltech. Web-based jVote will facilitate disseminating the experimental methodology to a wide audience of economists and political scientists, including those without access to a physical lab. The mini-conferences will serve to strengthen the dialogue between theory and empirics, and between economics and political science.