Group Size uncertainty in shared resource use

以前关于共享或公共资源使用的工作已经研究了关于一个群体可用的资源量的不确定性、环境不确定性以及其他人的行为的不确定性、社会不确定性的影响。这项研究考察了另一个不确定性的来源，即与参与者数量有关的不确定性。我们称这种群体规模为不确定性。在对比了群体规模不确定性和环境不确定性之后，我们建立了一个涉及多个来源的典型情景，在这个情景中可以研究群体规模不确定性。给出了简单情形下基于策略分析的均衡解，并对均衡的性质进行了描述。然后，我们讨论了一个简单的试错学习过程是否能够找到均衡的问题。这个问题的答案显然是否定的。学习模型发现的均衡不仅与战略分析有很大的不同，而且与博弈论的纳什均衡也有很大不同，这表明需要构建一种混合的试错学习理论和预测人类行为的战略视角。

Prior work on the use of shared or common resources has studied the impact of uncertainty about the amount of resource available to a group, evnironmental uncertainty, and uncertainty ablut the behavior of others, social uncertainty.This study examines yet another source of uncertainty, that pertaining to the number of participants. We call this group size uncertainty. After contrasting group size uncertainty with environmental uncertainty, we develop a prototypical situation involving multiple sources within which group size uncertainty can be studied. Equilibrium solutions based on strategic analysis are developed for simple cases and the properties of the equilibria are described. We then address the question of whether a simple trial-and-error learning process will be able to find the equilibria. The answer to this question is clearly "no". The equilibria found by the learning model are quite different not only from the strategic analysis but also from thegame theoretic Nash equilibria suggesting the need to construct a hybrid theory of trial-and-error learning and strategic perspective for predicting human behavior.