I study a game of strategic exploration with private payoffs and public actions in a Bayesian bandit setting. In particular, I look at cascade equilibria, in which agents switch over time from the risky action to the riskless action only when they become sufficiently pessimistic. I show that these equilibria exist under some conditions and establish their salient properties. Individual exploration in these equilibria can be more or less than the single-agent level depending on whether the agents start out with a common prior or not, but the most optimistic agent always underexplores. I also show that allowing the agents to write enforceable ex-ante contracts will lead to the most ex-ante optimistic agent to buy all payoff streams, providing an explanation to the buying out of smaller start-ups by more established firms.
翻译:我研究了一种战略探索的游戏,在贝叶斯山土匪中,我研究的是私人支付和公开行动的战略探索。我特别研究了级联的平衡,在这种平衡中,代理商只有在足够悲观时才能从风险行动向无风险行动转变。我表明,这些平衡在某些条件下存在,并建立了其显著的特性。在这些平衡中,个体探索可以或多或少于单一试剂水平,取决于代理商是否以共同的先发制人为起点,但最乐观的代理商总是在探索不足的情况下。我还表明,允许代理商签署可执行的事先合同将导致最先发制人乐观的代理购买所有付款流,并解释由更成熟的公司购买小型新企业的原因。