Steffen Huck (WZB Berlin)
Website: www.wzb.eu/de/personen/steffen-huck
Title: Games played through agents in the laboratory: A test of Prat and Rustichini (2003) Abstract: From the regulation of sport competitions to lawmaking in parliament, in many situations one group of people ("agents") make decisions that affect payoffs of another group of people ("principals"). The principals have a stake in the agents' decisions and therefore may offer bribes to agents. \citet{Prat2003} characterize pure-strategy equilibria of such games, in which principals can make action-contigent offers to agents. Specifically, they predict the equilibrium outcome in pure strategies to be efficient under some conditions. With field data hard to come by, we test the theory in a series of experimental treatments with human principals and comptuerized agents. The theory does amazingly well in explaining the data. Subjects predominantly offer bribes that implement efficient outcomes. In some treatments offers fall short of equilibrium preditions though. These minor deviations from equilibrium predictions are explored in a quantal response equilibrium framework. and Diego Moreno (U. Carlos III de Madrid)
Website: www.eco.uc3m.es/~dmoreno/index_en.html
Title: The Value of Public Information in Common-Value Tullock Contests Paper Abstract: Consider a symmetric common-value Tullock contest with incomplete information in which the players' cost of effort is the product of a random variable and a deterministic real function of effort, d. We show that the Arrow-Pratt curvature of d; Rd; determines the effect on equilibrium efforts and payoffs of the increased flexibility/reduced commitment that more information introduces into the contest: If Rd is increasing, then effort decreases (increases) with the level of information when the cost of effort (value) is independent of the state of nature. Moreover, if Rd is increasing (decreasing), then the value of public information is non-negative (non-positive). paper jointly with E. Einy, D. Moreno, and B. Shitovitz