Intention or Request: The Impact of Message Structures

Siyu Wang and Timothy Flannery
Additional contact information
Siyu Wang: Department of Economics and the Institute for the Study of Economic Growth, Wichita State University, Wichita, KS 67260, USA
Timothy Flannery: Economics Department, Missouri State University, Springfield, MO 65897, USA

Games, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-13

Abstract: This paper investigates how different message structures impact communication strategy as well as sender and receiver behavior. Specifically, we focus on comparing communication games with messages stating an intention versus a request. Our experimental results show that when a game includes self-signaling or self-committing messages, the two message structures yield negligibly different results. However, when the messages of the game are neither self-signaling nor self-committing, we find that more subjects send messages suggesting cooperation with request than intention. Interestingly, subjects also deviate from their suggested actions more frequently with request than intention. We surmise lying aversion plays a prominent role in contributing to the differences in games where messages lack the self-committing property.

Keywords: communication; cheap talk; experiment; lying aversion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C C7 C70 C71 C72 C73 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/12/1/12/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/12/1/12/ (text/html)

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:gam:jgames:v:12:y:2021:i:1:p:12-:d:490664

Access Statistics for this article

Games is currently edited by Ms. Susie Huang

More articles in Games from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().