An Experimental Study of Truth-Telling in a Sender-Receiver Game

Santiago Sánchez-Pagés and Marc Vorsatz

Edinburgh School of Economics Discussion Paper Series from Edinburgh School of Economics, University of Edinburgh

Abstract: A recent experimental study of Cai and Wang on strategic information transmission games reveals that subjects tend to transmit more information than predicted by the standard equilibrium analysis. To evidence that this overcommunication phenomenon can be explained in some situations in terms of a tension between normative social behavior and incentives for lying, we show that in a simple sender-receiver game subjects incurring in costs to punish liars tell the truth more often than predicted by the equilibrium analysis whereas subjects that do not punish liars after receiving a deceptive message play equilibrium strategies. Thus, we can partition the subject pool into two groups, one group of subjects with preferences for truth-telling and another group taking into account only economic incentives.

Keywords: experiment; sender-receiver game; strategic information transmission; truth-telling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C73 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32
Date: 2004-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (25)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.econ.ed.ac.uk/papers/id128_esedps.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: An experimental study of truth-telling in a sender-receiver game (2007)
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:edn:esedps:128

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Edinburgh School of Economics Discussion Paper Series from Edinburgh School of Economics, University of Edinburgh 31 Buccleuch Place, EH8 9JT, Edinburgh. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Research Office ().