While I have no reason to suspect Hanson’s summary of the agency literature is inaccurate
I’m not sure the implicit message in his summary is accurate. He says “But this literature has not found that smarter agents are more problematic, all else equal”. This is perfectly compatible with “nobody has ever modelled this problem at all”; if someone had modelled it and said that smarter agents don’t misbehave, then that should have been cited. He says that the problem is generally modelled with the agent (and the principle) being unboundedly rational. This means that smartness and rationality cannot be modelled within the model at all (and I suspect that these are the usual “unboundedly-rational-with-extremely-limited-actions-sets” which fail at realistically modelling either bounded or unbounded rationality).
That could be. I had assumed that when referring to the literature he was including some number of real-world examples against which those models are measured, like the number of lawsuits over breach of contract versus the estimated number of total contracts, or something. Reviewing the piece I realize he didn’t specify that, but I note that I would be surprised if the literature didn’t include anything of the sort and also that it would be unusual for him to neglect current real examples.
I’m not sure the implicit message in his summary is accurate. He says “But this literature has not found that smarter agents are more problematic, all else equal”. This is perfectly compatible with “nobody has ever modelled this problem at all”; if someone had modelled it and said that smarter agents don’t misbehave, then that should have been cited. He says that the problem is generally modelled with the agent (and the principle) being unboundedly rational. This means that smartness and rationality cannot be modelled within the model at all (and I suspect that these are the usual “unboundedly-rational-with-extremely-limited-actions-sets” which fail at realistically modelling either bounded or unbounded rationality).
That could be. I had assumed that when referring to the literature he was including some number of real-world examples against which those models are measured, like the number of lawsuits over breach of contract versus the estimated number of total contracts, or something. Reviewing the piece I realize he didn’t specify that, but I note that I would be surprised if the literature didn’t include anything of the sort and also that it would be unusual for him to neglect current real examples.