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Abstract Collaboration enables multiple actors with different objectives to work together and achieve a goal beyond individual capabilities. However, strategic uncertainty from partners' actions introduces a potential for losses under failed collaboration relative to pursuing an independent system. The fundamental tradeoff between high‐value but uncertain outcomes from collaborative systems and lower‐value but more certain outcomes for independent systems induces a bistability strategic dynamic. Actors exhibit different risk attitudes that impact decisions under uncertainty which complicate shared understanding of collaborative dynamics. This paper investigates how risk attitudes affect design and strategy decisions in collaborative systems through the lens of game theory. First, an analytical model studies the effect of differential risk attitudes in a two‐actor problem with stag‐hunting strategic dynamics formulated as single‐ and bi‐level games. Next, a simulation model pairs actors with different risk attitudes in a 29‐game tournament based on a prior behavioral experiment. Results show that outcomes collaborative design problems change based on the risk attitudes of both actors. Results also emphasize that considering conservative lower‐level design options facilitates collaboration by providing risk‐averse actors with a safer solution. By accepting that decision‐making actors are not all risk‐neutral, future work seeks to develop new design methods to strengthen the adoption of efficient collaborative solutions.
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Measuring Risk Attitudes for Strategic Decision-Making in a Collaborative Engineering Design Process
This paper evaluates a questionnaire-based risk attitude assessment method to quantify individual risk attitudes for strategic, multi-actor design decisions. A lottery-equivalence questionnaire elicits a utility curve for risky payoffs which is fit to a Constant Absolute Risk Aversion (CARA) model. Secondary data from a multi-actor design experiment provides observations of strategic decisions in two-actor design games for validation. 124 participants complete the risk attitude questionnaire and a series of 29 experimental tasks. Assuming participants follow the risk dominance equilibrium selection criterion, a risk-neutral utility function accurately predicts 62.2% of decisions. Incorporating risk attitudes elicited from the questionnaire only increases the accuracy to 63.3% while incorporating risk attitudes inferred from observations increases the accuracy to 77.5%. While participants exhibit differential risk attitudes in design tasks, results show the lottery-equivalent questionnaire does not provide risk attitudes consistent with strategic design decisions. Results support findings that risk in the engineering domain is contextual. This paper concludes that risk attitude is an important factor in understanding strategic decisions in interactive engineering design settings and understanding risk attitudes can help create more efficient design processes.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1943433
- PAR ID:
- 10352229
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ASME 2022 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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