Serious games for improved defense contracting

Abstract

Gaming has been explored as a research technique in complex systems to explore human interactions within technical domains. These so-called "serious games" are designed for purposes outside of pure entertainment and are intended to help researchers engage with qualitative data that focuses on human behavior. This thesis focuses on a research game called ColumBID which was designed for the Production in the Innovation Economy shipbuilding study. This game seeks to understand the negotiation process in defense contracting and is used to facilitate and record the participants' movement through the tradespace. From a game theory perspective, we analyzed the non-Pareto dominant movements through the tradespace and found that humans explore the space by sliding along fronts until they reach an optimal and then jumping to another front to negotiate another optimal point. The players then compare these optimal points to simplify the multi-variable optimization. We found that an 8% contract price improvement in the competitive case compared to the monopolistic case. This thesis recommends that serious research game design focus on questions about the process rather than the endgame optimization.