Cheap talk with multiple audiences: An experimental analysis

We examine strategic information transmission in a controlled laboratory experiment of a cheap talk game with one sender and multiple receivers. We study the change in equilibrium behavior from the addition of another audience as well as from varying the degree of conflict between the senderʼs and receiversʼ preferences. We find that, as in cheap talk games with just one receiver, information transmission is higher in games with a separating equilibrium, than in games with only a babbling equilibrium. More interestingly, we find clear evidence that the addition of another audience alters the communication between the sender and the receiver in a way consistent with the theoretical predictions. There is evidence of the presence of agents that are systematically truthful as senders and trusting as receivers: deviations from the theoretical predictions, however, tend to disappear with experience, and learning is faster precisely in the games where deviations are more pronounced.     

Reputational cheap talk with misunderstanding

We consider a cheap talk game with a sender who has a reputational concern for an ability to predict a state of the world correctly, and where receivers may misunderstand the message sent. When communication between the sender and each receiver is private, we identify an equilibrium in which the sender only discloses the least noisy information. Hence, what determines the amount of information revealed is not the absolute noise level of communication, but the extent to which the noise level may vary. The resulting threshold in transmission noise for which information is revealed may differ across receivers, but is unrelated to the quality of the information channel. When information transmission has to be public, a race to the bottom results: the cut-off level for noise of transmitted information now drops to the lowest cut-off level for any receiver in the audience.     

Social communication and discrimination: a video experiment

We report on an experiment using video technology to study effects of communication on donations to and discrimination between potential receivers. The experimental design eliminates strategic factors by allowing two receivers to unilaterally communicate with an anonymous dictator before the latter decides on her gifts. Through the use of three communication setups (none, audio, and audio-visual) we analyze purely social effects of communication. A silent video channel leads to discrimination between potential receivers based on impression formation, but does not affect average levels of donations. When the auditory channel is added, average donations increase. The social processes invoked by the visual and audio channels are heterogeneous and communicator-specific but not unsystematic.     

Credulity, lies, and costly talk

This paper studies a model of strategic communication by an informed and upwardly biased sender to one or more receivers. Applications include situations in which (i) it is costly for the sender to misrepresent information, due to legal, technological, or moral constraints, or (ii) receivers may be credulous and blindly believe the sender's recommendation. In contrast to the predictions obtained in the benchmark cheap talk model, our model admits a fully separating equilibrium, provided that the state space is unbounded above. The language used in equilibrium is inflated and naive receivers are deceived.     

On the value of participation: endogenous emergence of social norms in a three-player ultimatum game experiment

We report results from two different settings of a three-player ultimatum game. Under the “Monocratic” rule, a player is randomly selected to make an offer to two receivers. Under the “Democratic” rule, all three players make a proposal, and one proposal is then randomly selected. A majority vote is required to implement the proposal in either setting. Although the two rules are strategically equivalent, different patterns of behaviour emerge as the number of interactions increase. Under the “Monocratic” rule, proposers seem to be entitled to claim a larger share of the pie, and receivers are more likely to accept, than in the “Democratic” rule. We speculate that institutions allowing more participation in the process of collective choice lead to a more socially responsible behaviour in individuals.     

Broadcasting Opinions with an Overconfident Sender*

We analyze a model where an altruistic, but possibly overconfident sender broadcasts one of a finite set of messages to rational receivers. If broadcasting is costless and the sender is rational, there is an informationally efficient equilibrium, but multiple equilibria may arise, and asymmetric equilibria might be more informative than the symmetric equilibrium even if the prior is symmetric. Although overconfidence on the part of the sender reduces informativeness in some cases, it may also eliminate less informative equilibria and lead to better information transmission. Overconfidence can also improve the informativeness of the message when broadcasting is costly.     

Words, Deeds, and Lies: Strategic Behaviour in Games with Multiple Signals

We report the results of an experiment in which subjects play games against changing opponents. In one treatment, "senders" send "receivers" messages indicating intended actions in that round, and receivers observe senders' previous-round actions (when matched with another receiver). In another treatment, the receiver additionally observes the sender's previous-round message to the previous opponent, enabling him to determine whether the sender had lied. We find that allowing multiple signals leads to better outcomes when signals are aligned (all pointing to the same action), but worse outcomes when signals are crossed . Also, senders' signals tend to be truthful, though the degree of truthfulness depends on the game and treatment, and receivers' behaviour combines elements of pay-off maximization and reciprocity.     

Human capital and economic growth in an overlapping generations model

The paper describes an aggregative optimal growth model, the essential features of which are that individuals are mortal and obtain their labor skill through educational training. The process of human capital formation is described by an education function which relates the pass rate to the educational expenditure per student. Two alternative scenarios, private and public education regimes, are separately investigated. Under the decentralized education regime, risk-neutral individuals borrow to finance their education when young. Under the centralized education regime, the cost of education is financed by taxes imposed on the workers in the economy, and the central government maximizes a long-term social target function. The equilibria of both regimes are analyzed and various comparative static results derived. It is shown that educational investment in a decentralized equilibrium is higher than that in the centralized steady state. We also establish that there exists a time discount rate at which or above which the decentralized per capita consumption exceeds that of the centralized steady state whereas for time rates of discount sufficiently near the population growth rate, the above result will be reversed.     

The Windy Commons?

Wind power generation is growing rapidly in the United States, doubling nearly every three years since 1998. Yet, wind is an open access resource, and past experiences with open access resources suggest that tragedies of the commons may occur. While the engineering literature has focused on turbine siting within a wind farm to maximize profits and minimize interaction effects, the economics literature has overlooked interaction effects between windfarms. We provide a qualitative framework for measuring wake externalities and use simulation modeling to determine their magnitude. We find that: a) turbine wake externalities (and thus losses) to downwind sites increase with the square of wind velocity and can be substantial, b) decentralized ownership across wind farms leads to overcapitalization in upwind sites and undercapitalization in downwind sites relative to sole ownership, c) when multiple potential patches are considered, more land will be used upwind for wind power under decentralized ownership, and d) numerical simulations suggest that total rents are reduced under decentralized ownership by up to 12%, while total power produced increases by approximately 10%. Under our central parameters, decentralized ownership may be preferred to a sole owner, depending on the value society places on clean power relative to dirty power.     

Truth,Trust, and Sanctions: On Institutional Selection in Sender–Receiver Games*

We have conducted a laboratory experiment to investigate the impact of institutions and institutional choice on truth‐telling and trust in sender–receiver games. We find that in an institution with sanctioning opportunities, receivers sanction predominantly after having trusted lies. Individuals who sanction are responsible for truth‐telling beyond standard equilibrium predictions, and they are more likely to choose the sanctioning institution. Sanctioning and non‐sanctioning institutions coexist if their choice is endogenous, and the former shows a higher level of truth‐telling but lower material payoffs. Our experimental findings are consistent with logit agent quantal response equilibrium with two distinct groups of individuals: one consisting of subjects who experience non‐monetary lying costs as senders and non‐monetary costs when being lied to as receivers, and the other consisting of payoff maximizers.     

We can't disagree forever

Under the assumption of common priors, if the information partitions of two agents are finite, then simply by communicating back and forth and revising their posteriors the two agents will converge to a common equilibrium posterior, even though they may base their posteriors on quite different information. Furthermore, given any integer, n, one can construct an example in which the revision process not only takes n steps to converge, but no evident revision occurs—for (n?1) steps both agents repeat the same conflicting posteriors—until the last step, when the two agents decide to agree. Common knowledge of each other's posterior does not necessarily lead agents to the posterior they would have agreed upon had information been directly exchanged. On the other hand, the examples that are characterized by a discrepancy between the direct and indirect communication equilibrium, are rare: with probability 1, the revision process constructed here leads the two agents in one step to the direct communication equilibrium.     

信息能力与我国财政执法

财政分权体制下,中央对地方政府财政政策执行与绩效等信息的掌握是实现地方"为增长而激励"的前提。"警察巡逻式"和"火险警报式"作为代理人行动与绩效信息获取的两种基本模式,在适用条件和制度效率等方面存在很大不同。中央政府需要依据不同的制度环境综合运用两种模式,以实现地方政府信息获取模式的最优解。     

Centralized versus decentralized taxation of mobile polluting firms

We consider a world in which a mobile polluting firm must locate in one of two regions. The regions differ in two dimensions: their marginal cost of pollution and the production cost of the firm. It is shown that under incomplete information on regional marginal costs of pollution, fiscal competition may lead to the sub-optimal location of the firm. We also show that under incomplete information, a sub-optimal location is less likely under centralized than under decentralized taxation.     

基于响应时间的供应链协调策略研究

在市场需求价格和响应时间敏感下,本文以一个供应商和一个制造商构成的两级MTO供应链为背景,通过建立供应链收益函数模型,分析响应时间对供应链企业决策的影响。给出了供应商和制造商在分散决策下的最优响应策略,得出了供应链双方在分散决策下无法实现供应链完美协调的结论。而后,对供应链协调问题进行了探讨,发现两部收费制契约在满足一定条件下能够实现供应链完美协调,并通过数值实例对上面的结论进行了释义和说明。     

新媒体：重塑产业结构的力量

新媒体的产业价值在于用新技术重构、整合并创造人际传播与大众传播模式，实现传者与受者的双向精确分化，建立起了纵向的、以不同量级受众规模来排序的传媒产业价值链，并通过最高量级的传播通道实现利益的最大化。     

Human Fallibility, Complementarity, and Fiscal Decentralization

This paper examines economic growth properties under alternative fiscal organizations when a bureau's decisions are fallible. A country consists of J jurisdictions, which need a public service. In a centralized government, one authority decides on services in every jurisdiction. In a decentralized government, J authorities are in charge of each public service. An authority can have high ability or low ability, and an authority with high ability draws a good project with higher probability. We first show that the decentralized government provides the same average quality of public services, with lower variance, than does the centralized government. We then apply this result to an economic growth model where the value of the Solow residual is a constant elasticity of substitution (CES) function of public services. We show that there is a critical value of the degree of complementarity below which fiscal decentralization is more desirable than fiscal centralization for an expected economic growth, and the decentralized government has a lower variance of GDP growth.     

Ascending price Vickrey auctions

We show that an ascending price auction for multiple units of a homogeneous object proposed by Ausubel (i) raises prices for packages until they reach those nonlinear and non-anonymous market clearing prices at which bidders get their marginal products and (ii) the auction is a primal–dual algorithm applied to an appropriate linear programming formulation in which the dual solution yields those same market clearing prices. We emphasize the similarities with efficient incentive compatible ascending price auctions to implement Vickrey payments when there is a single object or when objects are heterogeneous but each buyer does not desire more than one unit. A potential benefit of these common threads is that it helps to establish the principles upon which Vickrey payments may be implemented through decentralized, incentive compatible procedures.     

Incentives and income under market socialism

The nature of the bonus function under market socialism and the implications of such functions for a comparison of income distributions under socialist and capitalist economic systems are examined. It is shown that when efficiency is required, when enterprise shutdown rules are taken into account, and when information is decentralized, the bonus will be equal to the profits of the enterprise. Lange's social dividend must be zero. Hence, contrary to previous claims, one can make no strong conclusions when comparing the degree of inequality of the income distribution under competitive capitalism and market socialism.     

Natural Resource Federalism: Preferences Versus Connectivity for Patchy Resources

We examine the efficiency of centralized versus decentralized management of spatially-connected renewable resources when users have heterogeneous preferences for conservation versus extraction. Resource mobility induces a spatial externality, while spatial preference heterogeneity drives a wedge between users’ privately optimal extraction rates. We first address these market failures analytically and show that the first is most efficiently handled with centralized planning while the second is best tackled with decentralized management. Except in special cases, neither approach will be first best, but which arises as second best depends on the relative strength of preference heterogeneity versus spatial mobility of the resource. We illustrate the theory, and test its robustness, with a numerical example.     

中国情境下口碑传播对农村居民购买决策影响的实证分析

口碑传播作为我国农村居民在生活中传播信息内容最丰富、最受信任的沟通方式,极大地影响着农村消费者的购买选择。本文从口碑传受双方特征、口碑信息类型与农村居民购买决策之间的关系入手,得出传播者专业能力对口碑在农村消费群体中传播效果的影响最大,意见领袖居其次,感知风险、关系强度和口碑信息类型也发挥着不同程度的影响,且产品类别的调节作用显著。这说明企业要想提高自身在农村市场的竞争力,积极开展口碑营销是行之有效的途径,应不遗余力地从各方面着手与农村居民建立联系,针对不同产品类别加强口碑管理。