Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: Regret in Games: When It Is Not (Only) Your Fault

这个项目位于经济学和心理学的交界处。它将考察后悔和责备的感觉如何在人们进行战略性互动的情况下塑造人类行为，从而使每个人的福利也取决于其他人的行动。它提出，当人们感到对糟糕的结果负有责任时，他们会后悔自己的行为。另一方面，当他们认为别人应该为糟糕的结果负责时，他们会责怪别人。这个项目将研究后悔和责备之间的紧张关系如何影响行为和经济结果。该项目将(I)强调在经济模型中考虑情绪的重要性，(Ii)加强我们对由于责任分工可能导致合作减少和低效结果的环境的理解，以及(Iii)产生一种以前不存在的数据类型，供其他经济学和心理学研究人员使用。这项拟议的工作将检验游戏中的后悔。它将提出一个理论，在这个理论中，战略互动的代理人做出选择时，既考虑了实质性的回报，也考虑了他们的选择可能产生的遗憾。这一理论解释了玩家对游戏结果的责任分工如何影响玩家(预期的)后悔的程度(对她在游戏中的行为和由此产生的回报)。这是第一部考虑后悔的战略形式的作品，因为早期的作品分析后悔似乎是在一个单一主体的背景下，将对手的行动视为世界状态。直觉是这样的。在决策论的背景下，结果完全是决策者(DM)选择和“运气”(最初未知的世界状态)的结果。考虑到DM对结果的影响力，后悔的感觉很自然地会出现。另一方面，博弈的结果是多个主体战略互动的结果。因此，假设一名运动员可能不会(期望)经历相同程度的后悔情绪，因为她可能对所有运动员行为的综合结果不那么负责任。具体地说，假设一名球员的后悔倾向于在其他球员的动作被揭示后，她所选择的动作被证明是次优的。然而，如果其他玩家也可以做出不同的选择(让每个人过得更好)，那么她的遗憾就会减轻，因为部分责任归因于他们。该项目将从理论和实验两方面考察这种后悔和指责的考虑如何影响经济结果，以及考虑到这些考虑是否会导致更接近实验结果的理论预测。该项目将有三个主要好处。首先，它将有助于我们理解在什么情况下责任归属和指责会影响战略互动的结果。它还将帮助我们了解这一影响是增加还是损害福利，并衡量影响的程度。其次，它将通过强调在游戏中应用时修改所选模型的收益来为理论工作提供信息。最后，它将产生关于游戏中后悔和指责的实验数据，供其他研究人员使用。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project lies at the interface of economics and psychology. It will examine how feelings of regret and blame shape human behavior in situations where people interact strategically so that each person’s welfare also depends on the actions of others. It poses that people regret their actions when they feel responsible for a bad outcome. On the other hand, they blame other people when they believe them to be responsible for the bad outcome. This project will examine how this tension between regret and blame affects behavior and economic outcomes. The project will (i) emphasize the importance of accounting for emotions in economic models, (ii) enhance our understanding of environments where reduced cooperation and inefficient outcomes may arise due to division of responsibility, and (iii) produce a previously nonexistent type of data that other researchers in economics and psychology can use.This proposed work will examine regret in games. It will propose a theory where strategically-interacting agents make choices taking into account both material payoffs and the regret that their choices may generate. This theory accounts for how the magnitude of a player’s (anticipated) regret (for her action in a game and her resulting payoff) is affected by the division of responsibility between the players for the outcome of the game. This is the first work to consider a strategic form of regret, since earlier works have analyzed regret as if in a single-agent context with the opponents’ actions treated as the state of the world. The intuition is as follows. In a decision-theoretic context an outcome is exclusively a result of the decision-maker’s (DM) choice and ”luck” (the at first unknown state of the world). Feelings of regret can naturally arise given the power the DM has over the outcome. On the other hand, the outcome of a game is the result of the strategic interaction of multiple agents. Thus, it is postulated that a player may not (expect to) experience feelings of regret to the same degree, as she may feel less responsible for the combined result of all the players’ actions. Specifically, it is posed that a player’s regret tends to arise when her chosen action is proven sub-optimal after the other players’ actions are revealed. However, her regret is mitigated if it is also revealed that the other players could have chosen differently (making everyone better off), as part of the blame is attributed to them. The project will examine both theoretically and experimentally how such regret and blame considerations affect economic outcomes and whether accounting for these consideration leads to theoretical predictions closer to experimental findings. The project will have three main benefits. First, it will contribute to our understanding of the circumstances under which attribution of responsibility and blame can affect outcomes of strategic interactions. It will also help us understand whether this effect will be welfare enhancing or damaging, and gauge the magnitude of the effect. Second, it will inform theoretical work by emphasizing the gains from modifications to models of choice when those are applied in games. Last, it will produce experimental data on regret and blame in games that other researchers can use.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.