Communication and Social Preferences: An Experimental Analysis
CESifo, Munich, 2021
CESifo Working Paper No. 8850
This paper reports on experiments regarding cheap talk games where senders attempt deception when their interests are not in conflict with those of the receiver. The amount of miscommunication is higher than in previous experimental findings on cheap talk games in situations where senders’ and receivers’ interests are not in conflict. We obtain this even though, as in previous literature, some participants appear to feature a cost of lying. We argue our findings could be attributed to distributional preferences of senders who lie to avoid the receiver getting a higher payoff than herself.
Public Finance
Behavioural Economics