Communication with multiple senders: An experiment

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Vespa, Emanuel; Wilson, Alistair J.
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California Santa Barbara; Pennsylvania Commonwealth System of Higher Education (PCSHE); University of Pittsburgh
• 刊物名称: QUANTITATIVE ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1759-7323
• DOI: 10.3982/QE500
• 发表日期: 2016
• 页码: 1-36
• 关键词: Information transmission; cheap talk; multiple senders; full revelation

摘要

We implement multi-sender cheap talk in the laboratory. While full-information transmission is not theoretically feasible in the standard one-sender-one- dimension model, in this setting with more senders and dimensions, full revelation is generically a robust equilibrium outcome. Our experimental results indicate that fully revealing outcomes are selected in particular settings, but that partial-information transmission is the norm. We uncover a number of behavioral patterns: On the one hand, senders follow exaggeration strategies, qualitatively similar to those predicted by a special case for the fully revealing equilibrium. Receivers, on the other hand, follow differing heuristics depending on the senders' biases, which are not always sequentially rational. When full revelation is observed it can be explained as the intersection of the receiver heuristics with the equilibrium response.