Cheap-talk Messages Research Articles

Asymmetric conflict games with an extremist

This paper extends the conflict game of Baliga and Sjöström (2012) by allowing for an asymmetry between players. We demonstrate that (i) a player with a greater net gain from playing a hawkish action is more likely to play a hostile action and thereby the risk of war increases with it, and that (ii) an extremist cannot manipulate the conflict via cheap-talk message whenever the properties of actions are asymmetric between the players.

An Experimental Study on the Effects of Communication, Credibility, and Clustering in Network Games

Abstract We examine how preplay communication and clustering affect play in a challenging hybrid experimental game on networks. Free-form chat is impressively effective in achieving the nonequilibrium efficient outcome, but restricted communication has little effect. We support this result with a model about the credibility of cheap-talk messages. We also offer a model of message diffusion that correctly predicts more rapid diffusion without clustering. We show an interaction effect of network structure and communication technologies. A remarkable result is that restricted communication is quite effective in a network stag hunt but not in our extended game.

Quality communication via cheap-talk messages in experimental auctions

This paper examines the incentives of low-quality sellers to truthfully communicate their product quality in an environment where high-quality sellers cannot fully separate themselves. Private information about the product’s quality can be conveyed through cheap-talk messages, and products are sold in one of four auction formats: first-price (FPA), second-price (SPA), all-pay (APA), or sealed-bid double auctions (DA). Our study finds that low-quality sellers can benefit from honestly communicating their quality under certain circumstances, such as in risky auction formats (DA and APA) and when there is a low prior probability of high-quality products. We also observe that low-quality claims can be more profitable, regardless of the competitiveness of the environment. Finally, we demonstrate that sellers’ ability to set reservation prices does not improve communication regarding product quality.

Extreme (and non-extreme) punishments in sender-receiver games with judicial error: An experimental investigation

In many real world situations, decision-makers have the opportunity to punish informed senders for their biased recommendations, while lie-detection is far from perfect. Hence, we conduct an experiment which incorporates ex post punishment and monitoring uncertainty into the discrete sender-receiver game first introduced by Crawford and Sobel, where a knowledgeable sender sends a cheap-talk message to a receiver who determines a policy action. After taking this action, the receiver observes a noisy signal of the true state and can impose a costly punishment on the sender. We vary the strength of punishment from mild (nominal), strong (deterrent) to extreme (potential of losing everything), and vary receiver's signal uncertainty when punishment is extreme. We find that receivers punish less as the strength of punishment increases, which suggests people care more about wrongly punishing innocent senders harsher than not being able to hand liars harsher punishments they deserve. More importantly, the opportunity of punishment encourages receivers to follow senders more and thus improves overall information transmission and utilization, even though senders need not exaggerate less.

Full revelation of expertise before disclosure

We consider the communication of expertise in a disclosure game. A sender wants to persuade a receiver to take a high-value action. The sender has private information about her ability to acquire evidence, called her expertise. After the sender communicates her expertise through a cheap-talk message, she obtains some evidence that she can (partially) disclose or conceal. The receiver wants to take an action based on the true information. We demonstrate that the sender’s expertise can be fully revealed through pure cheap talk before the disclosure game. • A disclosure game in which a receiver does not know a sender’s expertise. • Before acquiring information, the sender communicates her expertise to the receiver. • The sender’s expertise can be fully revealed through pure cheap talk before the disclosure game.

Two-sided strategic information transmission

We investigate a cheap talk model in which a decision maker and an expert are both privately informed. Both players observe independent signals that jointly determine ideal actions for the players, and the decision maker can send a cheap talk message to the expert, which is followed by the cheap talk of the expert and then the action of the decision maker. In equilibrium, the strategy of the decision maker is not monotonic, and the revelation of the decision maker concerning her information does not necessarily result in welfare improvement of the players. In particular, in models in which optimal actions are additively and/or multiplicatively separable in the information of two players and their preferences are represented by quadratic loss functions, the information revelation of the decision maker cannot facilitate information transmitted from the expert.

The development of randomization and deceptive behavior in mixed strategy games

We study the foundations for the development of optimal randomization in mixed strategy games. We consider a population of children and adolescents (7 to 16 years old) and study in the laboratory their behavior in a nonzero sum, hide‐and‐seek game with a unique interior mixed strategy equilibrium where each location has a known but different value. The vast majority of participants favor the high‐value location not only as seekers (as predicted by theory) but also as hiders (in contradiction with theory). The behavior is extremely similar across all ages, and also similar to that of the college students control adult group. We also study the use of cheap talk (potentially deceptive) messages in this game. Hiders are excessively truthful in the messages they send while seekers have a slight tendency to (correctly) believe hiders. In general, however, messages have a small impact on outcomes. The results point to a powerful (erroneous) heuristic thinking in two‐person randomization settings that does not get corrected, even partially, with age.

Common-Value Public Goods and Informational Social Dilemmas

We experimentally examine private information and communication in a public goods environment with uncertain returns. We consider a common-value public goods game in which the return to contribution is either high or low. Before contributing, three players observe private signals correlated with the return and send cheap talk messages to one another. There are social gains from truthfulness, but a private incentive to exaggerate. We compare treatments with and without cheap talk, finding that communication is largely truthful and increases efficiency. In further treatments, we increase the incentive to exaggerate and find reduced truthfulness and smaller gains from communication. (JEL C72, D82, D83, H41)

Casting Doubt: Image Concerns and the Communication of Social Impact

AbstractWe investigate strategic communication about the social impact of costly prosocial actions. A ‘sender’ with noisy information about impact sends a cheap-talk message to a ‘receiver’, upon which both agents choose whether to act. In the presence of social preferences and image concerns, the sender trades off persuasion, exaggerating impact to induce receiver action, and justification, downplaying impact to cast doubt on the effectiveness of action and excuse her own passivity. In an experiment on charitable giving we find evidence for both motives. In line with our theory and a justification motive, increasing image concerns reduces communication of positive impact.

Cheap Talk Messages for Market Design: Theory and Evidence from a Labor Market with Directed Search

In a model with cheap talk, employers can send messages about their willingness to pay for higher ability workers, which job-seekers can use to direct their search and tailor their wage bid. Introducing such messages leads—under certain conditions—to an informative separating equilibrium which affects the number of applications, types of applications, and wage bids across firms. This model is used to interpret an experiment conducted in a large online labor market: employers were given the opportunity to state their relative willingness to pay for more experienced workers, and workers can easily condition their search on this information. Preferences were collected for all employers, but only treated employers had their signal revealed to job-seekers. In response to revelation of the cheap talk signal, job-seekers targeted their applications to employers of the right “type” and they tailored their wage bids, affecting who was matched to whom and at what wage. The treatment increased measures of match quality through better sorting, illustrating the power of cheap talk to improve market outcomes. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Does Informative Opposition Influence Electoral Accountability?

In majoritarian legislatures, minority parties cannot directly influence policymaking. However, they may serve as whistleblowers against the majority parties' harmful policymaking. This study aims to explore whether a minority party's monitoring mitigates a political agency problem in a majoritarian legislature. For this purpose, we construct a two-period election model in which voters face information asymmetries regarding each party's type and the state of the world. After the majority party's policymaking, the minority party sends a cheap-talk message about whether to oppose the policymaking. We show that the monitoring by the minority party is not useful, even if we allow the possibility that the party is the truth-telling type. As long as the initial popularity of the minority party is not too high, its opposition is informative, but does not change the electorate's voting behaviors. Consequently, it does not improve electoral accountability at all. This irrelevance of monitoring is resolved when the minority party can directly influence policymaking, for example, through obstruction.

Incentives of Low-Quality Sellers to Disclose Negative Information

The paper studies incentives of low-quality sellers to disclose negative information about their product. We develop a model where one’s quality can be communicated via cheap-talk messages only. This setting limits ability of high-quality sellers to separate as any communication strategy they pursue can be costlessly imitated by low-quality sellers. Two factors that can incentivize low-quality sellers to communicate their quality are buyers’ risk-attitude and competition. Quality disclosure reduces buyers’ risk thereby increasing their willingness to pay. It also introduces product differentiation softening the competition. We show that equilibria where low-quality sellers separate exist under monopoly and duopoly. Even though low-quality sellers can costlessly imitate high-quality sellers, equilibria where high-quality sellers separate can also exist but under duopoly only.

An Experimental Study on the Effects of Communication, Credibility, and Clustering in Network Games

The effectiveness of social interaction depends strongly on an ability to coordinate actions efficiently. In large networks, such coordination may be very difficult to achieve and may depend on the communication technology and the network structure. We examine how pre-play communication and clustering within networks affect coordination in a challenging experimental game on eight-person networks. Free-form chat is enormously effective in achieving the non-equilibrium efficient outcome in our game, but restricted communication (where subjects can only indicate their intended action) is almost entirely ineffective. We can rationalize this result with a novel model about the credibility of cheap-talk messages. This credibility is much larger with free-form message communication than with restricted communication. We are the first to model this credibility and show, both theoretically and experimentally, an interaction effect of network structure and communication technologies. We also provide a model of message diffusion, which indeed predicts that diffusion will be more rapid without clustering and is consistent with our data.

An Experimental Study on the Effects of Communication, Credibility, and Clustering in Network Games

The effectiveness of social interaction depends strongly on an ability to coordinate actions efficiently. In large networks, such coordination may be very difficult to achieve and may depend on the communication technology and the network structure. We examine how pre-play communication and clustering within networks affect coordination in a challenging experimental game on eight-person networks. Free-form chat is enormously effective in achieving the non-equilibrium efficient outcome in our game, but restricted communication (where subjects can only indicate their intended action) is almost entirely ineffective. We can rationalize this result with a novel model about the credibility of cheap-talk messages. This credibility is much larger with free-form message communication than with restricted communication. We are the first to model this credibility and show, both theoretically and experimentally, an interaction effect of network structure and communication technologies. We also provide a model of message diffusion, which indeed predicts that diffusion will be more rapid without clustering and is consistent with our data.

Full revelation under optional verification

We analyze a Sender–Receiver game in which the Sender can choose between a costless cheap-talk message and a costly verifiable message. In a discrete setting we state conditions under which the Receiver always learns the true state while the Sender uses different message types in different states. On the contrary we show that such a fully revealing equilibrium does not exist if the state and action space are continuous.

Using cheap talk to polarize or unify a group of decision makers

We develop a model of strategic information transmission from an expert with informational superiority to decision makers who vote on a proposal. We show that an expert's simple cheap talk strategy can be surprisingly effective in persuading decision makers by polarizing or unifying their opinions. After observing the expert's cheap talk message, decision makers may ignore their private information and vote according to the expert's interest, even though they know the expert has her own bias. In other words, the expert's cheap talk prevents a voting procedure from aggregating decision makers' private information. We also discuss how our main results extend to a model of Bayesian persuasion.

Using Cheap Talk to Polarize or Unify a Group of Decision Makers

We develop a model of strategic information transmission from an expert with informational superiority to decision makers who vote on a proposal. We show that an expert’s simple cheap talk strategy can be surprisingly effective in persuading decision makers by polarizing or unifying their opinions. After observing the expert’s cheap talk message, decision makers may ignore their private information and vote according to the expert’s interest, even though they know the expert has her own bias. In other words, the expert’s cheap talk prevents a voting procedure from aggregating decision makers’ private information. We also discuss how our main results extend to a model of Bayesian persuasion.

Cheap talk with an exit option: a model of exit and voice

The paper presents a formal model of the exit and voice framework proposed by Hirschman (Exit, voice, and loyalty: responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1970). More specifically, we modify Crawford and Sobel’s (Econometrica 50(6):1431–1451, 1982) cheap talk model such that the sender of a cheap talk message has an exit option. We demonstrate that the presence of the exit option may increase the informativeness of cheap talk and improve welfare if the exit option is relatively attractive to the sender and relatively unattractive to the receiver. Moreover, it is verified that perfect information transmission can be approximated in the limit. The results suggest that the exit reinforces the voice in that the credibility of exit increases the informativeness of the voice.

Using Cheap Talk to Polarize or Unify a Group of Decision Makers

We develop a model of strategic information transmission from an outside expert with informational superiority to a group of people who make a decision by voting on a proposal. An outside expert who observes the qualities of a proposal sends a cheap talk message to decision makers with limited information. A simple cheap talk strategy of the expert can be surprisingly effective in persuading decision makers by polarizing or unifying their opinions. When there is a significant informational gap, decision makers vote in the expert's interest by focusing only on the expert's message, even though they know she has her own bias.

Multistage Information Transmission with Voluntary Monetary Transfer

We analyze a cheap talk model in which an informed sender and an uninformed receiver engage in finite-period communication before the receiver chooses a project. During the communication phase, in each period, the sender sends a cheap talk message and the receiver voluntarily pays money for the message she receives. Our results show that combining multistage information transmission with the receiver's voluntary payments can improve welfare. Moreover, we find an upper bound of the receiver's equilibrium payoff and provide a sufficient condition for it to be approximated by the receiver's equilibrium payoff. This result shows that multistage information transmission with voluntary monetary transfer can be more beneficial for the receiver than a wide class of other communication protocols (e.g., mediation and arbitration).