Measuring agents’ reaction to private and public information in games with strategic complementarities
实验研究策略互补性博弈中，公共信息比同等精度的私人信息对均衡行为影响更大，发现被试平均更重视公共信号，但权重低于理论均衡值。
Abstract In games with strategic complementarities, public information about the state of the world has a larger impact on equilibrium actions than private information of the same precision, because public signals are more informative about the likely behavior of others. We present an experiment in which agents’ optimal actions are a weighted average of the fundamental state and their expectations of other agents’ actions. We measure the responses to public and private signals. We find that, on average, subjects put a larger weight on the public signal. In line with theoretical predictions, as the relative weight of the coordination component in a player’s utility increases, players put more weight on the public signal when making their choices. However, the weight is smaller than in equilibrium, which indicates that subjects underestimate the information contained in public signals about other players’ beliefs.