Infinitely Repeated Games with Private Monitoring: An Experimental Analysis

该奖项资助的研究将利用实验室实验来测试战略互动的博弈论模型。许多经济情况涉及重复互动，决策者无法直接观察其他参与者的决策。在许多这样的情况下，每个决策者都有关于其他人决策的部分信息。任何代理观察其他人在错误中所做的事情(观察到的事情只有他们自己知道)的游戏都是一个私人监控的游戏。有许多真实世界的例子，经济理论最近在开发分析这些博弈的新方法方面取得了实质性进展。然而，这些理论还没有受到实证检验。这些游戏有许多现实世界的例子，但从这些例子中收集数据来测试理论是困难的。关于特工私下观察到什么的数据很少。此外，从理论的角度来看，其他关键参数往往是不可观察到的或难以测量的。鉴于此，实验室为探索这种环境中的行为提供了一个有价值的替代方案。不完全私人监控的经济学理论主要考虑了两个极端：几乎完美的监控和几乎公开的监控。顾名思义，几乎完美是不完美的，但非常接近完美监控(玩家的信号根据他们的行动是不相关的)，而几乎公共的IS有一个私人组件，但非常接近公共的(其中信号是相关的)。这项由该奖项资助的新研究在一系列三个项目中进行了几乎完美的研究和几乎公开的监测。要解决的第一个问题很简单：在监测不完善和私密的情况下，受试者能否支持合作？如果受试者确实可以支持一些合作，那么下一个问题是，当监测是私下的，而不是公开的或完美的时，他们的行为有什么不同？这个问题需要探索的一个更苛刻的版本是，最经常使用的策略是什么，这些策略如何随着信息结构的具体情况而变化？这些问题是通过在实验室实施随机终止的囚犯困境游戏的三个项目来解决的。这些项目将对我们所知的具有私人监控的无限重复游戏产生实质性影响。它们还将通过更广泛的不完善监控来加深我们对行为的理解。无限重复的游戏是许多类型人类互动的特征：政治、心理、社会学等；使这个项目本质上是跨学科的。因此，这些结果将与许多应用相关。了解促进或阻碍合作的因素是社会科学中的一个关键问题，这项研究将提供部分答案。PI还将为研究生和本科教育做出贡献；各种各样的学生将参与这项研究。

This award funds research that will employ laboratory experiments to test game theory models of strategic interaction.Many economic situations involve repeated interactions where decision makers cannot directly observe the decisions made by other participants. In many of these situations, decision makers each have partial information about others' decisions. Any game where agents observe what the others do with error (and what is observed is only known to them) is a game with private monitoring. There are many real world examples, and economic theory has recently made substantial progress in developing new methods for analyzing these games. However, these theories have not yet been subjected to empirical testing. There are many real-world examples of these games, but gathering data from these examples to test the theory is difficult. Data about what agents privately observe is rare. Furthermore, other critical parameters from the point of view of the theory are often not observable or difficult to measure. Given this, the laboratory offers a valuable alternative to explore behavior in such environments.The economic theory of imperfect private monitoring has mainly considered two extremes: almost perfect and almost public monitoring. As the names imply, almost perfect is imperfect but very close to perfect monitoring (where the players' signals are uncorrelated conditional on their actions) and almost public is has a private component but is very close to public (where signals are correlated). The new research funded with this award studies both almost perfect and almost public monitoring, in a series of three projects. The first question to be addressed is simple: can subjects support cooperation when monitoring is imperfect and private? If indeed subjects can support some cooperation, then the next question is how is their behavior different when monitoring is private as opposed to public or perfect? A more demanding version of this question to be explored is what strategies are most often used, and how do these vary with the particulars of the information structure? These are addressed by three projects implementing randomly terminated prisoner's dilemma games in the laboratory. These projects will have a substantial impact on what we know about infinitely repeated games with private monitoring. They will also further our understanding of behavior with imperfect monitoring more generally.Infinitely repeated games are characteristic of many types of human interactions: political, psychological, sociological, et cetera; making this project intrinsically interdisciplinary. Hence, these results will be relevant to many applications. Understanding factors that facilitate or hinder cooperation is a key question in the social sciences, and this research will provide partial answers. The PI will also be contributing to both graduate and undergraduate education; a wide variety of students will participate in this research.