Ultimatum Game Approach to Billet Assignments.

摘要

Personnel costs constitute a major component of the operations budget of the U.S. Navy. Transitioning to a more market oriented staffing model in which Commanding Officers (hereafter labeled the Assignment Officer or AO) are provided incentives to reduce personnel costs that may yield significant savings. An unintended consequence, increased separation rates on the part of sailors, would result in lower levels of readiness for the Navy missions. The essential features of the implemented labor market can be captured in the ultimatum game (UG) in which the proposer (AO) makes an offer and the responder (Sailor) accepts or reject. Since there are multiple billets in a command unit, the billet assignment problem can be modeled as multi-person UG. To investigate the effects of alternative incentives for the AO, we implement the features of the multi-person UG in a laboratory market setting in which an AO is tasked with filling three billets under different institutional rules designed to introduce components of a market based system of staffing billets.