Bluffing in Price Bargain Promotes Resource Utilization at the Individual Level but Leads to the Imbalance of Social Welfare

As a self-interest serving and autonomous agent, individuals from various ecosystems typically employ bluffing as a competing strategy at presence of limited living resources, ranging from territory defense[1] to poker game[2]. But in human economic society, how this strategy works in resource allocation and what consequences it may bring in a free-market context still remain to be explored. In this paper, we modeled human bluffing behavior in a designed price bargain game, proposed a matched-by-individuals resource allocation method and ran a series of agent-based simulation experiments to compare it with matched-by-authority method. The simulation results show that matched-by-individuals method driven by endogenous bluffing behavior promotes resource utilization at the individual level compared with matched-by-authority method driven by exogenous compulsive power, but leads to the imbalance of welfare at the social level. Efficiency or equality, this seems to be an unavoidable question when talking about free market. Our findings emphasize the necessary of a comprehensive vision in public administration and of implications to distributed resource allocation system design.