Abstract
This paper investigates how different message structures impact communication strategy as well as sender and receiver behavior. Specifically, we focus on comparing communication games with messages stating an intention versus a request. Our experimental results show that when a game includes self-signaling or self-committing messages, the two message structures yield negligibly different results. However, when the messages of the game are neither self-signaling nor selfcommitting, we find that more subjects send messages suggesting cooperation with request than intention. Interestingly, subjects also deviate from their suggested actions more frequently with request than intention. We surmise lying aversion plays a prominent role in contributing to the differences in games where messages lack the self-committing property.
Department(s)
Economics
Document Type
Article
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/g12010012
Rights Information
© 2021 The authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Keywords
Cheap talk, Communication, Experiment, Lying aversion
Publication Date
3-1-2021
Recommended Citation
Wang, Siyu, and Timothy Flannery. "Intention or Request: The Impact of Message Structures." Games 12, no. 1 (2021): 12.
Journal Title
Games
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