Theoretical and Experimental Research on Voting and Bargaining Games

智力优势：本研究项目从理论和实验两方面研究了不完全信息条件下的战略投票和委员会议价机制。关于设计最优投票机制以有效地聚集偏好和信息的一般理论问题，没有明确的侧支付，以及在这种机制下的实际行为，许多问题仍未解决。从理论上讲，存在不同投票机制的相对绩效问题，其中绩效可以相对于几个不同的目标进行评估，包括经济效率、信息效率和公平。本研究从机制设计的角度研究投票行为，比较不同投票机制在不同环境下的表现。这项研究包括政治经济学中的五个项目。其中三个项目将探索在当前资助下开展的研究的有希望的扩展。它们是：(1)公共基础设施的动态政治经济学；(2)委员会的战略投票和信息获取；(3)委员会投票交易。第一个结论自然来自当前拨款下研究的动态政治讨价还价模型。谈判协议随着时间的推移而演变，过去的谈判结果为当前和未来的谈判奠定了基础。我们扩展了纯私人物品模型，将持久公共物品或“公共基础设施”纳入其中。我们建议比较不同的投票规则和政府组织对议价过程的影响，特别是对公共基础设施有效投资的影响。第二个项目是从PI和合作者对“摇摆选民的诅咒”进行的实验研究演变而来的，这是一种现象，即不太了解情况的选民有动机放弃甚至战略性地投票反对他们自己选择的结果，如果他们自己做出决定的话。这种延伸内化了选民获取信息的过程。拟议研究的第三部分涉及研究新的投票机制，该机制允许选民在不同问题维度的多个决策中表达偏好强度。我们将竞争均衡分析应用到这种环境中，提出了一个新的带有投票交易的均衡概念，称为“事前交易均衡”。然后，我们通过建立受控的实验室“投票市场”来研究该模型的预测能力。重点是比较静力学预测和效率特性。新增的两个项目是：(4)动态协调问题中效率的出现；(5)动态诅咒均衡及其在不完全信息动态议程复杂投票中的应用。对数据的分析将探索这些有限理性的扩展模型，以帮助解释理论在哪些地方和为什么似乎是适当的，以及在哪些地方和为什么它是错误的。项目(4)描述了受协调博弈对称结构约束的有效动态均衡。我们将设计并进行实验，观察小组中玩家数量的影响以及游戏对称结构的影响。项目(5)探索了有限战略复杂性的新规范，将被诅咒的均衡扩展到广泛形式的博弈。它将传统的“混合策略”（策略形式）的诅咒均衡逻辑扩展到行为策略。最初的公式是以战略的形式完成的，因此诅咒均衡的思想在许多顺序上下文中没有作用。我们将其应用于各种顺序博弈，特别是具有不完全信息的顺序投票。更广泛的影响：除了基础研究外，拟议的研究还具有教育成分，通过训练研究生实验经济学和经济理论。本研究的最终目标是更好地理解委员会中的程序如何影响决策，并着眼于理解如何修改这些程序以改进决策并克服诸如偏好和信念冲突以及信息不对称等障碍。从长远来看，这种更好的理解可以提高组织和决策机构的绩效。投票程序的绩效是根据传统的经济福利标准、信息效率和公平性来评估的。在这项拨款下，有广泛的软件开发计划。该软件可以被实验经济学的其他研究人员免费使用，并将作为开源代码公开提供。

Intellectual merits: This research project studies strategic voting and committee bargaining mechanisms under conditions of incomplete information from both theoretical and experimental perspectives. Many questions remain unresolved about the general theoretical problem of designing optimal voting mechanisms to efficiently aggregate preferences and information, without explicit side payments, and also about actual behavior under such mechanisms. Theoretically, there are questions of the relative performance of different voting mechanisms, where performance can be evaluated relative to several different objectives, including economic efficiency, informational efficiency, and equity. The research approaches voting behavior from a mechanism design perspective, and compares the performance of different voting mechanisms in different kinds of environments. The research encompasses five projects in political economy. Three of these projects will explore promising extensions of the research initiated under the current grant. These are: (1) The Dynamic Political Economy of Public Infrastructure; (2) Strategic Voting and Information Acquisition in Committees; and (3) Vote Trading in Committees. The first follows naturally from the dynamic political bargaining model studied under the current grant. Bargaining agreements evolve over time, with past bargaining outcomes setting the table for current and future rounds of bargaining. We extend that pure private good model to incorporate a dimension of durable public goods, or "public infrastructure." We propose to compare the effects of different voting rules and government organization on the bargaining process, especially with respect to the effects on efficient investment in public infrastructure. The second project evolved from experimental studies conducted by the PI and collaborators on the "swing voter's curse," a phenomenon whereby less informed voters have incentives to either abstain or even vote strategically against the outcome they would choose if the decision they would choose on their own. The extension endogenizes the acquisition of information by voters. The third part of the proposed research involves studying new voting mechanisms that allow voters to express preference intensities over a multiple decisions across different issue dimensions. We apply competitive equilibrium analysis to this kind of environment and propose a new equilibrium concept with vote trading, called "ex ante exchange equilibrium." We then study the predictive power of this model by setting up controlled laboratory "vote markets." The emphasis is on the comparative statics predictions and the efficiency properties. The two additional projects are: (4) The Emergence of Efficiency in Dynamic Coordination Problems; and (5) Dynamic Cursed Equilibrium with an Application to Sophisticated Voting in Dynamic Agendas with Incomplete Information. The analysis of the data will explore these extended models of limited rationality to help explain where and why the theory seems to be adequate and where and why it misses. Project (4) characterizes efficient dynamic equilibria subject to constraints imposed by the symmetry structure of the coordination game. We will design and conduct experiments that look at the effects of the number of players in the group and also the effects of the symmetry structure of the game. Project (5) explores a new specification of limited strategic sophistication that extends the cursed equilibrium to extensive form games. It extends the cursed equilibrium logic from traditional "mixed strategies" (strategic form) to behavioral strategies. The original formulation was done in strategic form and so the idea of cursed equilibrium did not have bite in many sequential contexts. We apply this to a variety of sequential games,in particular sequential voting with incomplete information. Broader impacts: In addition to basic research, the proposed research has an education component, by training graduate students in experimental economics and economic theory. The ultimate goal of the research is to better understand how procedures in commitees affect decision making and with and eye to understanding how these procedures may be modified to improve decision making and overcome obstacles such as conflicting preferences and beliefs, and asymmetric information. This better understanding in the long run can improve performance of organizations and policy-making institutions. The performance of voting procedures are evaluated according to traditional economic welfare criteria, informational efficiency, and equity. There is extensive software development proposed under the grant. This software may be used freely by other researchers in experimental economics and will be publicly available as open source code.