Lying About What You Know or About What You Do?

Abstract

We compare communication about private information to communication about actions in a oneshot 2-person public good game with private information. The informed player, who knows the exact return from contributing and whose contribution is unobserved, can send a message about the return or her contribution. Theoretically, messages can elicit the uninformed player's contribution, and allow the informed player to free-ride. The exact language used is not expected to matter. Experimentally, however, we find that free-ride depends on the language: the informed player freerides less-and thereby lies less frequently-when she talks about her contribution than when she talks about the return. Further experimental evidence indicates that it is the promise component in messages about the contribution that leads to less free-ride and less lying. (JEL: E21, E12)

How Private is Private Information? The Ability to Spot Deception in an Economic Game

“…Another aspect of our design is that the private information of sellers concerns the state of nature, rather than their own actions. Serra-Garcia et al (2013) show that people are less likely to lie about their actions than about their knowledge of the state of nature. Clearly, many extensions are possible, and we hope that our framework provides an avenue for future research.…”

Money Talks? An Experimental Investigation of Cheap Talk and Burned Money

“…Because it directly affects the receivers' payoffs, the first mover's own contribution does not have a purely communicative role. A second important difference is that Serra-Garcia et al (2013) do not study the situation where both information sources are present, as we do. Their study thus cannot shed light on the interplay between the two communication channels and on how this varies with the level of interest alignment, which is the key focus of the present study.…”

“…It allows a clean identification of the pure signaling intent of costly signals. 7 The same difference applies to Serra-Garcia et al (2013) as well. They study a public good game where an informed first mover can signal his private information about the marginal per capita return either through his own contribution or a costless message and find that words can be as influential as actions.…”

Meaning and credibility in experimental cheap-talk games

“…First, as long as |M| ≥ 2, Games 1 and 2 both have multiple perfect Bayesian equilibrium outcomes not Pareto ranked. This creates rooms for equilibrium selection, and yet Pareto 9 Other studies that adopt between-subject manipulations of message spaces include Blume et al (1998), who document that restricting the message space expedites convergence in the presence of meaningless messages; Lai, Lim, and Wang (2015), who highlight the role of message spaces in facilitating information transmission in a multidimensional setting; and Serra-Garcia, van Damme, and Potters (2013), who study the effect of limiting the message space in public good games with communication of private information. Our novel contribution relative to these studies lies in providing a new channel-a refinement of equilibria-through which message spaces may play a role in information transmission.…”