Rules and Commitment in Communication: an Experimental Analysis / Guillaume R. Fréchette, Alessandro Lizzeri, Jacopo Perego.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fréchette, Guillaume R.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Lizzeri, Alessandro.

Perego, Jacopo.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w26404.

NBER working paper series no. w26404

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Rules and Commitment in Communication

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2019.

Summary:

We study the role of commitment in communication and its interactions with rules, which determine whether information is verifiable. Our framework nests models of cheap talk, information disclosure, and Bayesian persuasion. It predicts that commitment has opposite effects on information transmission under the two alternative rules. We leverage these contrasting forces to experimentally establish that subjects react to commitment in line with the main qualitative implications of the theory. Quantitatively, not all subjects behave as predicted. We show that a form of commitment blindness leads some senders to overcommunicate when information is verifiable and undercommunicate when it is not. This generates an unpredicted gap in information transmission across the two rules, suggesting a novel role for verifiable information in practice.

Notes:

Print version record

October 2019.