The value of lies in an ultimatum game with imperfect information (original) (raw)
Related papers
Lying about the price? Ultimatum bargaining with messages and imperfectly observed offers
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2015
We introduce the taxicab game, related to the ultimatum game and Gehrig et al.'s (2007) yes/no game. The proposer makes an offer, and simultaneously sends a cheap talk message indicating (possibly falsely) the amount of the offer. The responder observes the message with certainty and the offer with probability p before accepting or rejecting the offer. We investigate versions with p = 0 and p = 0.5 along with the ultimatum game as a baseline. Intuition and a model comprising both standard economic agents and others who dislike inequity, lies and lying provide clear predictions that our experimental results support. As the likelihood increases of offers being seen, the offers themselves increase, messages overstate them less, and responders are more likely to accept (even when the offer is unseen). Also, responders are more likely to accept after truthful messages than after lies or when no message is sent.
Implicit vs. explicit deception in ultimatum games with incomplete information
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2013
We explore bargaining, using ultimatum games, when one party, the proposer, possesses private information about the pie size and can either misrepresent this information through untruthful statements (explicit deception) or through information-revealing actions (implicit deception). Our study is the first such direct comparison between two ways in which people can deceive. We find that requiring informed parties to make an explicit statement yields greater deception than when information is communicated implicitly, particularly for larger stakes. However, allowing the explicit statement to be accompanied by a promise of truthfulness reverses this effect. In contrast with many previous studies, we generally observe very high frequencies of dishonesty.
Sse Efi Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance, 2007
We experimentally investigate the effect of cheap talk in a bargaining game with one-sided asymmetric information. A seller has private information about his or her skill and is provided an opportunity to communicate this information to a buyer through a written message. Four different treatments are compared; one without communication, one with free-form communication, and two treatments with pre-specified communication in the form of promises of varying strength. Our results suggest that lying about private information is costly and that the cost of lying increases with the size of the lie and the strength of the promise. Freely formulated messages lead to the fewest lies and the most efficient outcomes.
The value of lies in a power-to-take game with imperfect information
Humans can lie strategically in order to leverage on their negotiation power. For instance, governments can claim that a "scapegoat" third party is responsible for reforms that impose higher costs on citizens, in order to make the pill sweeter. This paper analyzes such communication strategy within a variant of the ultimatum game. The first player gets an endowment, and the second player can impose a tax on it. The former can reject the allocation submitted by the tax-setter. A third party is then allowed to levy its own tax, and its intake is private information to the tax-setter. In a frameless experiment, 65% of the subjects in the tax-setter role overstate the tax levied by the third party in order to manipulate taxpayer's expectations and submit less advantageous offers; on average, for every additional currency unit of lie, measured by the gap between the claimed and the actual tax, they would reduce their offer by 0.43 currency units.
An experimental study of truth-telling in a sender-receiver game
Games and Economic Behavior, 2007
A recent experimental study of Cai and Wang [Cai, H., Wang, J., 2006. Overcommunication in strategic information transmission games. Games Econ. Behav. 95, 384–394] on strategic information transmission reveals that subjects tend to transmit more information than predicted by the standard equilibrium analysis. To evidence that this overcommunication phenomenon can be explained in terms of a tension between normative social behavior and incentives for lying, we show in a simple sender–receiver game that subjects incurring in costs to punish liars tell the truth more often than predicted by the logit agent quantal response equilibria whereas subjects that do not punish liars after receiving a deceptive message play, on the aggregate, equilibrium strategies. Thus, we can partition the subject pool into two groups, one group of subjects with preferences for truth-telling and one taking into account only material incentives.
Experimental Evidence on Deceitful Communication: Does Everyone Have a Price?
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2019
This paper introduces a new task to elicit individual aversion to deceiving, based on a modi…ed version of the Deception Game as presented in Gneezy (Am. Econ. Rev. 95 (1): 384-395: 2005). A multipleprice-list mechanism is used to determine the deception premium asked by an individual to switch from faithful to deceitful communication. The results show that, depending on payo¤s, 71% of the subjects will switch at most once. Among them, 40% appear to be either "ethical" or "spiteful". The other 60% respond to incentives in line with the cost of lying theory; they will forego faithful communication if the bene…t from deceiving the other is large enough. Regression analysis shows that this deception premium is independent of the risk aversion and social preferences of the subject; it would thus capture an inner preference for behaving well.
This paper studies lying in a novel context. Previous work has focused on situations in which people are either fully aware of the economic consequences of all available actions (e.g., die-under-cup paradigm), or they are uncertain, but this uncertainty cannot be cleared in any way (e.g., sender-receiver game). On the contrary, in reality, people oftentimes know that they will have a chance to lie, they are initially uncertain about the economic consequences of the available actions, but they can invest resources (e.g., time) to find them out. Here we capture the essence of this type of situations by means of a novel decision problem. Two experiments provide evidence of four empirical regularities regarding the distribution of choices, and suggest that participants vary along two dimensions: the moral cost of lying, and the cost of investing time to find out the payoffs associated to the available actions. Taking inspiration from these observations, we introduce a model that is cons...
Ultimatum Games with Incomplete Information on the Side of the Proposer: An Experimental Study
2004
Título: Ultimatum Games with Incomplete Information on the Side of the Proposer: An experimental Study Autores: Harstad, Ron; Nagel, Rosemarie Revista: Cuadernos de Economía, 2004 JUL-DIC; 27 (75) Página(s): 37-74 ISSN: 02100266 Resumen: Estudio sobre los juegos de ultimátum con información incompleta, que muestra cómo se obtiene el mismo resultado que en la versión con información completa.