Project description
Exploring the impact of individual traits on strategic decision-making
Understanding how individual traits affect behaviour and decision-making in strategic settings is a complex challenge. Traits like cognitive abilities, psychological features, and attitudes toward uncertainty can significantly influence outcomes. Traditional models often fail to separate these traits from the rules of interaction, leading to oversimplified analyses. This gap hampers our ability to predict and explain behaviour in diverse and realistic scenarios. The ERC-funded TRAITS-GAMES project addresses this by developing a formal framework that distinguishes the rules of interaction from players’ traits. This separation enables a rigorous analysis of traits in games, considering factors like cognitive abilities and emotions. By avoiding assumptions of common cognitive rationality, the project provides insights into long-term outcomes and institutional robustness.
Objective
I will analyse how agents’ traits affect behaviour and strategic reasoning in decision problems and games. Traits encompass stable cognitive and psychological features of agents, such as tastes, skills, cognitive abilities, attitudes toward uncertainty and misspecification, concerns for others, and propensities to be affected by emotions. To build an adequate formal framework, I will try to comply with a separation
principle: the description of the rules of interaction should be separate and independent from the description of players’ traits. This will enable a fruitful and conceptually rigorous analysis of personal traits in games, including players’ abilities and cognition, analogous to what has already been done—for example— concerning attitudes toward risk. Also, to model interactive strategic thinking (a.k.a. epistemic game theory), I will use a flexible approach that, unlike the standard one, does not assume common knowledge of cognitive rationality (e.g. of coherence). I will start with individual decision making and planning and then embed the analysis in interactive situations, with a special attention to sequential decision making and the role of time. Building on and improving upon my previous work on the foundations of game theory and psychological games, most of the analysis of the impact of traits on behaviour will be either focused on steady-state long run outcomes, using variations of the self-confirming concept, or outcomes consistent with subjective rationality and strategic reasoning, characterized by variations of rationalizability. Examples of the research questions to be addressed are the following: (1) How do cognitive feature affect strategic interaction? (2) Can institutions and agreements be robust to assumptions about interactive knowledge and beliefs about traits when players reason by forward induction? (3) How can we model context-dependent motivations? (4)
What is the impact on long-run of concerns for misspecification?
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2023-ADG
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20136 Milano
Italy
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