Whatever you say, your reputation precedes you: Observation and cheap talk in the trust game

Behavior in trust games has been linked to general notions of trust and trustworthiness, important components of social capital. In the equilibrium of a trust game, the investor does not invest, foreseeing that the allocator would keep all of the returns. We use a human-subjects experiment to test the effects of changes to the game designed to increase cooperation and efficiency. We add a pre-play stage in which the investor receives a cheap-talk message from the allocator, observes the allocator's previous decision, or both. None of these changes alter the game's theoretical predictions. We find that allowing observation results in substantially higher cooperation and efficiency, but cheap talk has little effect.     

Endogenous transfers in the Prisoner's Dilemma game: An experimental test of cooperation and coordination

We test a two-stage compensation mechanism for promoting cooperation in Prisoner's Dilemma games. Players first simultaneously choose binding non-negative amounts to pay their counterparts for cooperating, and then play the induced game knowing these amounts. In our games, all payment pairs consistent with mutual cooperation in subgame-perfect equilibrium transform these games into coordination games, with both mutual cooperation and mutual defection as Nash equilibria in the second stage. When endogenous transfer payments are not permitted, cooperation is much less likely. Mutual cooperation is most likely when the (sufficient) payments are identical, and it is also substantially more likely with payment pairs that bring the mutual-cooperation payoffs closer together. Both the Fehr–Schmidt and Charness–Rabin models predict that transfers that make final payoffs closer are preferred; however, they do not explain why equal transfers are particularly effective. Transfers are also effective in sustaining cooperation even when they are imposed and not chosen.     

Status Quo Bias in Bargaining: An Extension of the Myerson-Satterthwaite Theorem with an Application to the Coase Theorem

We generalize the Myerson-Satterthwaite theorem to study inefficiencies in bilateral bargaining over a divisible good, with two-sided private information on the valuations. For concave quasi-linear preferences, the ex ante most efficient Bayes equilibrium of any mechanism always exhibits a bias toward the status quo. If utility functions are quadratic every Bayes equilibrium is ex post inefficient, with the expected amount of trade biased toward the disagreement point. In other words, for the class of preferences we study, there is a strategic advantage to property rights in the Coase bargaining setup in the presence of incomplete information. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C78, D23, D62, D82.     

An experimental study of information and mixed-strategy play in the three-person matching-pennies game

Summary. Recent experiments on mixed-strategy play in experimental games reject the hypothesis that subjects play a mixed strategy even when that strategy is the unique Nash equilibrium prediction. However, in a three-person matching-pennies game played with perfect monitoring and complete payoff information, we cannot reject the hypothesis that subjects play the mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium. Given this support for mixed-strategy play, we then consider two qualitatively different learning theories (sophisticated Bayesian and naive Bayesian) which predict that the amount of information given to subjects will determine whether they can learn to play the predicted mixed strategies. We reject the hypothesis that subjects play the symmetric mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium when they do not have complete payoff information. This finding suggests that players did not use sophisticated Bayesian learning to reach the mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium. Received: August 9, 1996; revised version: October 21, 1998     

Playing the wrong game: An experimental analysis of relational complexity and strategic misrepresentation

It has been suggested that players often produce simplified and/or misspecified mental models of strategic decisions [Kreps, D., 1990. Game Theory and Economic Modeling. Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford]. We submit that the relational structure of players' preferences in a game is a source of cognitive complexity, and may be an important driver of such simplifications. We provide a classification of order structures in two-person games based on the properties of monotonicity and projectivity, and present experiments in which subjects construct representations of games of different relational complexity and subsequently play the games according to these representations. Experimental results suggest that relational complexity matters. More complex games are harder to represent, and this difficulty seems correlated with short term memory capacity. In addition, most erroneous representations are simpler than the correct ones. Finally, subjects who misrepresent the games behave consistently with such representations, suggesting that in many strategic settings individuals may act optimally on the ground of simplified and mistaken premises.     

The impact of economic and monetary uncertainty on the demand for money in emerging economies

By introducing uncertainty, monetary volatility and economic volatility are said to make the public cautious, hence increase their cash holdings or their demand for money. On the other hand, because of monetary and economic uncertainty if the public seek safer assets than money, they may hold less cash. In the absence of any paper testing for the impact of economic and monetary uncertainty on the demand for money in emerging economies, this article fills the gap by considering the experiences of six Central and Eastern European emerging economies and four other emerging economies. We found that the impact is transitory in most countries. Moreover, money demand is found correctly specified and stable in most countries, suggesting that policy based on monetary targeting could still be effective despite significant output and monetary uncertainty.     

The role of risk aversion in public goods dilemmas with environmental uncertainty: an experimental analysis

The purpose of this study is to extend earlier research on environmental uncertainty in public goods dilemmas. The present paper reports the results of an experiment designed to examine the effect of risk aversion on public goods provision. A von Neumann–Morgenstern utility function with constant coefficient of relative risk aversion is used to investigate the impact of risk attitudes within a threshold public goods environment. The outcome of the threshold public goods experiment shows that subjects are indifferent to the changes in environmental conditions. Additionally, the analysis indicates that risk aversion is a significant determinant of voluntary public goods contribution level.     

Trust and trustworthiness in games: An experimental study of intergenerational advice

This paper investigates the development of conventions of trust in what we call intergenerational games, i.e., games played by a sequence of non-overplapping agents, who pass on advice on how to play the game across adjacent generations of players. Using the trust game of Berg et al. (1995) as our experimental decision problem, advice seems to decrease the amount of trustthat evolves when this game in played in an inter-generational manner in that it decreases the amount of money sent from Senders to Returners. Ironically, advice increases trustworthinessin that Returners tend to send more back. Further, subjects appear to follows conventions of reciprocity in that they tend to Send more if they think the Returners acted in a “kind” manner, where kind means the Sender sent more money than the receiver expected. Finally, while we find a causal relationship running from trustworthiness to trust, the opposite can not be established. We note that many of our results can only be achieved using the tools offered by inter-generational games. The inter-generational advice offered provides information not available when games are played in their static form. Combining that information with elicited beliefs of the Senders and Returners adds even more information that can be used to investigate the motives that subjects have for doing what they do. Electronic supplementary material Electronic supplementary material is available for this article at and accessible for authorised users. JEL Classification C91 · C72 Resources for this research were provided by National Science Foundation grants SBR-9709962 and SBR-9709079 and by both the Center for Experimental Social Science and the C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics at New York University. We would like to thank Shachar Kariv for both his comments and research assistance. We also thank Mikhael Shor and Judy Goldberg for research assistance, and Yevgeniy Tovshteyn for computer programming.