Continued Studies of Endogenous Mechanisms

这项基于成就的更新建议要求继续研究集体决策机制或机构的设计，范围从投票制度到市场。关于这个主题的文献通常认为决策问题和可能的决策集是外生的。该项目下的研究重点是代理可以自由决定备选方案集是什么，决策问题本身是什么，甚至他们将使用哪种机制来做出决策。研究的第一部分研究了社会如何通过将不同的集体决策问题的决策联系起来而获益。在研究集体决策时，决策问题被看作是外生的。然而，通过将不同的、可能完全不相关的问题的决策联系起来，一个社会可以实现相对于孤立地对相同问题做出决策的帕累托改进。特别是，在激励方面，能够向代理询问问题，如“您更关心哪个问题”，这非常有帮助。研究的第二部分将继续研究社会如何选择投票规则。特别是，它将审查社会对可能涉及一系列投资的项目做出决定的情况。在这样一个动态的投票环境中，出现了几种有趣的情况，包括“期权-价值”考虑因素，以及投票规则可能产生非单调影响的变化。这项研究将确定有效的机制及其与不确定性结构的关系，以及理解选民自己将选择哪些机制来处理此类问题。研究的最后一部分着眼于投票程序，在这个程序中，公民选出代表，然后代表他们参加后来的投票。在这里，这项研究将分析不同群体的代表的选票应该如何在一个有效的规则中进行权衡，以及参与者如何选择这样的权重，以及这可能如何影响在工会首次成立时谁成为工会的一部分的选择。

This accomplishment based renewal proposal for continued research in the design of mechanisms or institutions for collective decision-making, ranging from voting systems to markets. The literature on this subject usually takes the decision problem and set of possible decisions to be exogenous. The research under this project focuses on situations where agents have discretion in what the set of alternatives are, what the decision problem itself is, and even which mechanism they will use to make a decision. The first part of the research studies how societies might gain by linking decisions across different collective decision problems. In studying collective decision-making, the decision problem is taken as exogenous. However, by linking the decisions over different, possibly completely unrelated problems, a society can achieve Pareto improvements relative to making decisions over the same problems in isolation. In particular, it is very helpful in terms of incentives to be able to ask agent's questions like "Which problem do you care more about?" The second part of the research will continue to study how societies choose the voting rules. In particular, it will examine situations where a society makes decisions over projects that may involve a sequence of investments. In such a dynamic voting environment, several interesting cases, including "option-value" considerations, and changes in voting rules that can have non-monotonic effects, arise. This research will identify efficient mechanisms and their relation to the structure of uncertainty, as well as understanding which mechanisms would be selected by the voters themselves to deal with such issues. The last part of the research looks at a voting procedure where citizens elect representatives who then participate in later votes on their behalf. Here the research will analyze how the votes of the representatives of different groups should be weighed in an efficient rule, as well as how such weights might be selected by participants and how this might affect the choice of who becomes part of a union when the union is first formed.