The Foundations of Cooperation

该项目继续并扩展了主要研究人员以前在社会组织方面的工作，并在很大程度上借鉴了我们以前在这一领域的国家科学基金项目。 该项目的成果将使人们更好地了解大型团体的合作。有大量的动态游戏的工作，证明了合作的情况下，可以强制执行组代理的战略行为。这项工作的动机大多是寡头垄断的问题，相对较少的球员，从这些模型的见解提供了一个不完全令人满意的理解在大集团合作。第一部分讨论权威--权威是什么，一个人如何获得、维护和使用权威，目的是提供对权威的理解，其核心是个人协调其他参与者行动的能力。一个好的权威模型应该满足几个必要条件，包括：（1）当一组代理人协调他们的行为以响应个人的声明时，个人就拥有了权威;（2）拥有权威的个人维护权威和利用权威的动机之间存在紧张关系;（3）太多的灵活性或不可预测性可能会破坏权威;（iv）权威不需要反映某种特殊能力;（v）权威并不产生于参与者简单地在由“权威”人物确定的均衡上协调。惩罚是动态博弈中大多数合作模型的核心成分，惩罚通常采取协调行动的形式，在感知到偏离规定的游戏之后。惩罚偏差的协调通常依赖于参与者之间关于过去偏差信号的共同知识或接近共同知识。这样的共识不太可能来自大群体中参与者的直接观察，任何共识都可能涉及群体成员之间的沟通。该项目的第二部分涉及将通信添加到动态游戏中。仅仅是通信的可能性将不会确保合作;通信协议必须给代理一个激励，如实地透露他们的信息，以加强cooperation.The代理的信息大小的概念最近被引入到捕捉的重要性，由一个单一的代理私人持有的信息，考虑其他代理的信息。 该项目调查信息的大小和程度之间的联系，可以构建激励机制，以诱导代理人透露私人信息。更广泛的影响The research will provide a better understanding of how cooperation acquires in large social groups.经济学和其他社会科学的一个中心问题是，为什么一些国家或群体的表现不如其他国家或群体。表现的差异似乎并不主要是由于可用资源的差异，这表明社会组织的差异可能很重要。该项目侧重于社会组织的特定方面-权威和交流-作为社会内部可能的合作水平的重要决定因素。这项研究将为更多的应用工作提供基础，旨在通过提供将社会结构与社会表现联系起来的模型来了解社会之间的差异。

The project continues and extends the principal investigators' previous work on the organization of society, and draws heavily on our previous National Science Foundation projects in this area. The results of the project will provide a better understanding of cooperation in large groups. There is a large body of work on dynamic games that demonstrates the circumstances under which cooperation can be enforced in groups of agents behaving strategically. Much of this work has been motivated by oligopolistic problems with relatively few players; the insights from these models provide a less than completely satisfactory understanding of cooperation in large groups.The project consists of two parts. The first part addresses authority - what it is, how a person might acquire it, maintain it, and use it. The aim is to provide an understanding of authority that centers on an individual's ability to coordinate other players' actions. A good model of authority should satisfy several desiderata, including: (i) An individual has authority when a group of agents coordinates their behavior in response to announcements by that individual; (ii) There is a tension between the incentives of the individual with authority to maintain that authority and to take advantage of his authority; (iii) Too much flexibility or unpredictability can destroy authority; (iv) Authority need not reflect some special ability; (v) Authority does not arise from players simply coordinating on an equilibrium identified by the "authority" figure.Punishment is a central ingredient of most models of cooperation in dynamic games, with punishment typically taking the form of coordinated actions following perceived deviations from prescribed play. The coordination in punishing deviations often rests on common knowledge, or near common knowledge, among the players about past signals of deviations. Such consensus is unlikely to arise from players' direct observations in large groups, and any consensus is likely to involve communication among the members of the group. The second part of the project involves adding communication to dynamic games. The mere possibility of communication will not ensure cooperation; the communication protocol must give agents an incentive to truthfully reveal their information for cooperation to be enforced.The notion of informational size of agents has been recently introduced to capture the importance of information held privately by a single agent, taking the information of other agents as given. The project investigates the connection between informational size and the degree to which incentives can be constructed to induce agents to reveal private information.Broader ImpactsThe research will provide a better understanding of how cooperation obtains in large social groups. A central question in economics and other social sciences as well is why some countries or groups do less well than others. The variation in performance seems not due primarily to differences in available resources, suggesting that differences in social organization are likely to be important. The project focuses on particular aspects of social organization - authority and communication - as important determinants of the level of cooperation possible within a society. The research will provide a foundation for more applied work aimed at understanding differences among societies by providing models linking social structure to social performance.