Expectations of reciprocity when competitors share information: Experimental evidence

Bernhard Ganglmair (), Alex Holcomb and Noah Myung

No 19-032, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: Informal exchange of information among competitors has been well-documented in a variety of industries, and one's expectation of reciprocity shown to be a key determinant. We use an indeterminate horizon centipede game to establish a feedback loop in the laboratory and show that an individual's beliefs about the recipient's intentions to reciprocate matter more than a recipient's ability to do so. This implies that reducing strategic uncertainty about a competitor's behavior has a stronger effect on information ows than reducing environmental uncertainty (about the competitor's ability). We further show results on the formation of beliefs and discuss managerial implications.

Keywords: knowledge diffusion; information sharing; reciprocity; conversation; experimental economics; centipede game (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C91 D8 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-gth
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/202332/1/1672260051.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Expectations of reciprocity when competitors share information: Experimental evidence (2020)
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:zbw:zewdip:19032

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().