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Cheap Talk Games: Comparing Direct and Simplified Replications

Experiments in Organizational Economics

ISBN: 978-1-78560-964-0, eISBN: 978-1-78560-963-3

Publication date: 18 December 2016

Abstract

To study strategic information transmission in organizations, we conduct a simplified version (with only three states) of the sender-receiver game experiment designed by Wang, Spezio, and Camerer (2010), in which an informative sender advises an uninformed receiver to take an action (to match the true state), but has incentives to exaggerate. We also have the same subjects play the original five-state game. We find similar “overcommunication” behavior with Taiwanese subjects – messages reveal more information about the true state than what equilibrium predicts – that let us classify subjects into various level-k types. However, results from the simplified version are closer to equilibrium prediction, with more senders robustly classified as level-2.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgment

Shu-Yu Liu, Meng-Chien Su, and Ally Wu provided excellent research assistance. We thank comments from Chen-Ying Huang, Pohan Fong, and Jian-Da Zhu. We thank financial support from the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan (MOST), formerly National Science Council (NSC) of Taiwan (Grant # 102-2628-H-002-002-MY4). All remaining errors are our own.

Citation

Hsieh, F.-W. and Wang, J.T.-y. (2016), "Cheap Talk Games: Comparing Direct and Simplified Replications", Experiments in Organizational Economics (Research in Experimental Economics, Vol. 19), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 19-38. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0193-230620160000019002

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

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