The medium or the message? Communication relevance and richness in trust games

Bicchieri, Cristina; Lev‐On, Azi; Chavez, Alex K.

doi:10.1007/s11229-009-9487-y

Cited by 23 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…5 Other studies have used a restricted communication treatment that was similar to the one of Dawes et al (1977). These studies find little impact of irrelevant communication on cooperation (Bouas and Komorita, 1996;Mulford et al, 2008;Bicchieri et al, 2010;Ismayilov and Potters, 2014). Frank et al (1993) implemented a treatment in which promises were not allowed.…”

Section: Treatments Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Sources of the Communication Gap

Offerman

Ven

2017

Management Science

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The sources of the communication gap He, S.; Offerman, T.J.S.; van de Ven, J. Link to publicationCitation for published version (APA): He, S., Offerman, T., & van de Ven, J. (2015). The sources of the communication gap. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam. General rightsIt is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulationsIf you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: http://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. Abstract: Face-to-face communication drastically increases cooperation rates in social dilemmas. We test which factors are the most important drivers of this communication gap. We distinguish three main categories. First, communication may decrease social distance. Second, communication may enable subjects to assess their opponent's cooperativeness ("type recognition") and condition their own action on that information. Third, communication allows subjects to make promises, which create commitment for subjects who do not want to break a promise. We find that communication increases cooperation by 56 percentage points. Roughly 74% of this effect can be attributed to type recognition, the remaining 26% to a commitment value. We do not find evidence that social distance plays a role.

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Section: Treatments Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Sources of the Communication Gap

Offerman

Ven

2017

Management Science

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“…The expectations involved in Bicchieri's account of social norms are of two (kinds: (i) empirical expectations (first-order beliefs that others will conform) and (ii) normative expectations (second-order beliefs that other will expect one 8 to conform). Extensive experimental work by Bicchieri and collegues (cf., e.g., Bicchieri and Xiao, 2009;Bicchieri and Chavez, 2010) show that empirical expectations by themselves may not be sufficient to motivate compliance to social norms, and that the presence of aligned second-order, normative expectations, can trigger compliance. While the present experiment does not deal directly with social norms, it does look at how first and second-order expectations as elicited by different experimental conditions affect coordination outcomes, thus offering insights on the role and nature of coordinating expectations.…”

Section: The Experimentalmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…21 See for instance Binmore (2008) and Sillari (2008). 22 For studies on the normative impact of (even very limited) computer-mediated communication in mixed-motive games see Bicchieri and Lev-On (2007) and Bicchieri, Chavez and Lev-On (2010), among others. the sense that receiving the message makes the receiver believe that the sender will do her part to honor the advice, and in the sense that sending the message makes the sender believe that the receiver will expect that the sender ought to conform to the advice she sent.…”

Section: Conclusion and Further Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

You Better Play 7: Mutual versus Common Knowledge of Advice in a Weak-Link Experiment

2012

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This paper presents the results of an experiment on mutual versus common knowledge of advice in a two-player weak-link game with random matching. Our experimental subjects play in pairs for thirteen rounds. After a brief learning phase common to all treatments, we vary the knowledge levels associated with external advice given in the form of a suggestion to pick the strategy supporting the payoffdominant equilibrium. Our results are somewhat surprising and can be summarized as follows: in all our treatments both the choice of the efficiency-inducing action and the percentage of efficient equilibrium play are higher with respect to the control treatment, revealing that even a condition as weak as mutual knowledge of level 1 is sufficient to significantly increase the salience of the efficient equilibrium with respect to the absence of advice. Furthermore, and contrary to our hypothesis, mutual knowledge of level 2 induces, under suitable conditions, successful coordination more frequently than common knowledge. * University of Perugia, Via Pascoli 20, 06123 Perugia. † Scuola Normale Superiore, Piazza dei Cavalieri 7, 56100 Pisa and LSE Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, London WC2A 2AE ‡ Corresponding author. Scuola Normale Superiore, Piazza dei Cavalieri 7, 56100 Pisa. 1 Epistemic attitudes: The formal and the experimentalThe purpose of this paper is to discuss-from the point of view of formal epistemology-some experimental results on the role of common knowledge as a coordination device in a weak-link coordination game. Common knowledge has long been regarded as a fundamental component in the modeling of rational interaction. As such it features prominently, though informally, in Nash's characterization of equilibrium. As game theory evolved towards capturing increasingly more refined solution concepts, common knowledge was there to stay as a fundamental modeling assumption. Harsanyi and Selten, to mention a particularly relevant example from the point of view of the present paper, put forward a view according to which the assumption of common knowledge of the players' rationality is sufficient to ensure the joint selection of efficient equilibria in (non-pure) coordination games.In a line of research which for a long time has been developed almost independently of the game-theoretic one, epistemic logicians have advanced, over the past two decades, rigorous characterizations of the epistemic attitudes of both individual and group knowledge and belief. The emergence of multi-agent epistemic logic thus enabled, around mid 1990s, the development of rigorous analyses of the epistemic conditions underlying game theoretic solution concepts.The ensuing investigations on the connection between rational agents' epistemic attitudes and their strategic behavior tended to fall into two seldom communicating categories, the formal and the experimental. This paper constitutes an attempt at fostering the cross-fertilization between those lines of research. It aims at so doing by taking full advantage...

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“…Richness may matter because it affects the background conditions under which promising occurs. When the environment and the means of communicating promises differ significantly from familiar settings in which promises are usually made, agents may become focused on the 'poverty' of the normative environment, fail to develop expectations about the future actions of promise-makers, and as a result may refuse to invest or cooperate themselves (Bicchieri and Lev-On 2007;Bicchieri, Lev-On, and Chavez 2009).…”

Section: Communication Group Size and Media Richnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Group and Dyadic Communication in Trust Games

Lev‐On

Chavez

Bicchieri

2010

Rationality and Society

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We study the behavioral consequences of interpersonal communication prior to experimental Trust games. We manipulated the richness of the communication medium and the size of the communicating group. Communication richness failed to produce significant differences in first-mover investments, but the size of the communicating group did: The amounts sent were significantly higher in the dyadic communication conditions than in the group communication and no-communication conditions. We also found that first-movers' expectations of secondmovers' reciprocation strongly predicted their levels of investment.

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The medium or the message? Communication relevance and richness in trust games

Cited by 23 publications

References 20 publications

The Sources of the Communication Gap

The Sources of the Communication Gap

You Better Play 7: Mutual versus Common Knowledge of Advice in a Weak-Link Experiment

Group and Dyadic Communication in Trust Games

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