Credible Communication and Cooperation: Experimental Evidence from Multi-stage Games

Ola Andersson and Erik Wengström

No 883, Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics

Abstract: It is well known that communication often serves as a facilitator for cooperation in static games. Yet, communication can serve entirely different purposes in dynamic settings as communication during the game may work as a means for renegotiation, potentially undermining the credibility of cooperative strategies. To explore this issue, this paper experimentally investigates cooperation and non-binding communication in a two-stage game. More specifically, two treatments are considered: one with only pre-play communication and one where subjects can also communicate intra-play between the stages of the game. The results highlight a nontrivial difference concerning the effects of pre-play communication between the two treatments. Pre-play communication only has a significant impact on cooperation when no intra-play communication is possible. The results suggest that the credibility of pre-play messages may depend crucially on future communication opportunities.

Keywords: Communication; Cooperation; Renegotiation; Experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C92 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2011-09-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo, nep-exp, nep-gth and nep-hpe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifn.se/wfiles/wp/wp883.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Credible communication and cooperation: Experimental evidence from multi-stage Games (2012)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:0883

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics Research Institute of Industrial Economics, Box 55665, SE-102 15 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Elisabeth Gustafsson ().