List of Past Events
Mechanisms for Cooperative Decision Making
Dr. Mary Rigdon
Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 01:00pm - 02:00pm
University of Michigan, Research Center for Group Dynamics
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This talk is about how decision makers solve problems of trust. In an important class of strategic environments (modeled by "trust games" and "investment games"), agents do better than predicted by classical game theory. How do they do that? Is it some form of altruism or is it some kind of implicit contract between them? The first part of the talk will report experimental results suggesting that agents solve these problems in part by attributing intentions to their counterparts (and that this is evidence against simple models of altruism). The second part of the talk will focus on experiments that explore the relationship between how agents solve problems of trust and external factors. For instance: Do post-hoc incentives make it easier for agents to reach cooperative outcomes or do they crowd-out cooperation? Does the pattern of links between agents -- the network their interactions are embedded in --matter to how they manage to cooperate?
