Krajbich Ian, Camerer Colin, Ledyard John, Rangel Antonio
Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA.
Science. 2009 Oct 23;326(5952):596-9. doi: 10.1126/science.1177302. Epub 2009 Sep 10.
Every social group needs to decide when to provide public goods and how to allocate the costs among its members. Ideally, this decision would maximize the group's net benefits while also ensuring that every individual's benefit is greater than the cost he or she has to pay. Unfortunately, the economic theory of mechanism design has shown that this ideal solution is not feasible when the group leadership does not know the values of the individual group members for the public good. We show that this impossibility result can be overcome in laboratory settings by combining technologies for obtaining neural measures of value (functional magnetic resonance imaging-based pattern classification) with carefully designed institutions that allocate costs based on both reported and neurally measured values.
每个社会群体都需要决定何时提供公共物品以及如何在其成员之间分摊成本。理想情况下，这一决策应使群体的净收益最大化，同时确保每个个体的收益大于其必须支付的成本。不幸的是，机制设计的经济理论表明，当群体领导者不知道个体成员对公共物品的价值时，这种理想解决方案是不可行的。我们表明，通过将获取价值神经测量的技术（基于功能磁共振成像的模式分类）与精心设计的、基于报告值和神经测量值来分摊成本的制度相结合，在实验室环境中可以克服这一不可能的结果。
