Communication and competition

Jacob Goeree and Jingjing Zhang

No 74, ECON - Working Papers from Department of Economics - University of Zurich

Abstract: Charness and Dufwenberg (American Economic Review, June 2011, 1211-1237) have recently demonstrated that cheap-talk communication raises efficiency in bilateral contracting situations with adverse selection. We replicate their finding and check its robustness by introducing competition between agents. We find that communication and competition act as "substitutes:" communication raises efficiency in the absence of competition but lowers efficiency with competition, and competition raises efficiency without communication but lowers efficiency with communication. We briefly review some behavioral theories that have been proposed in this context and show that each can explain some but not all features of the observed data patterns. Our findings highlight the fragility of cheap-talk communication and may serve as a guide to refine existing behavioral theories.

Keywords: Cheap talk; adverse selection; competition; guilt aversion; lie aversion; inequality aversion; reciprocity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-com, nep-exp and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/62416/1/econwp074.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:zur:econwp:074

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ECON - Working Papers from Department of Economics - University of Zurich Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Severin Oswald ().