ICES Seminar in Experimental Economics and Game Theory
A Practical Public Good Mechanism and Policing Application
Friday, November 22, 2024 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM EST
Vernon Smith Hall (formerly Metropolitan Building), 5183
The ICES Seminar in Experimental Economics and Game Theory of the Fall 2024 semester will feature:
Utah State
A Practical Public Good Mechanism and Policing Application
Abstract
How can a government effectively police the population? We propose a modified Groves-Ledyard (1977) mechanism that estimates the demand for a public good using population samples and selects an approximately optimal quantity. We then test our mechanism in a virtual Phase-0 trial that mirrors existing experiments, with known utility functions over generic commodities, and find our mechanism performs extraordinarily well. Further tests in a Phase-1 experiment, where participants choose the quantity of police in a virtual environment, show that our mechanism provides quantities that are close to theoretically optimal. Our proposed mechanism thus performs well in laboratory experiments and is practical to implement and scale in the real world.
For more information about the Seminar Series, please visit the Seminar Schedule homepage.
