Costly and discrete communication: An experimental investigation

Sean Duffy, Tyson Hartwig and John Smith

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Language is an imperfect and uneven means of communicating information about a complex and nuanced world. We run an experimental investigation of a setting in which the messages available to the sender imperfectly describe the state of the world, however the sender can improve communication, at a cost, by increasing the complexity or elaborateness of the message. As is standard in the communication literature, the sender learns the state of the world then sends a message to the receiver. The receiver observes the message and provides a best guess about the state. The incentives of the players are aligned in the sense that both sender and receiver are paid an amount which is increasing in the accuracy of the receiver's guess. As would be expected, we find that larger communication costs are associated with worse outcomes for both sender and receiver. Consistent with the communication literature, albeit in very different setting, we find that there is overcommunication. For the receiver, there is a positive relationship between the payoffs relative to the equilibrium predictions and communication costs. This relationship is negative for the senders. We also find that the response time of both the sender and receiver are positively related to their payoffs.

Keywords: communication; cheap talk; overcommunication (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C91 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-07-29
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cta and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/24148/1/MPRA_paper_24148.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Costly and discrete communication: an experimental investigation (2014)
Working Paper: Costly and discrete communication: An experimental investigation (2011)
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:pra:mprapa:24148

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().