Equilibrium Selection in Cheap Talk Games: ACDC Rocks When Other Criteria Remain Silent

Equilibrium Selection in Cheap Talk Games: ACDC Rocks when Other Criteria Remain Silent

Equilibrium selection in experimental cheap talk games

In the past, many refinements have been proposed to select equilibria in cheap talk games. Usually, these refinements were motivated by a discussion of how rational agents would reason in some particular cheap talk games. In this paper, we propose a new refinement and stability measure that is intended to predict actual behavior in a wide range of cheap talk games. According to our Average Cred...

Valuable Cheap Talk and Equilibrium Selection

Intuitively, we expect that players who are allowed to engage in costless communication before playing a game would be foolish to agree on an inefficient equilibrium. At the same time, however, such preplay communication has been suggested as a rationale for expecting Nash equilibrium in general. This paper presents a plausible formal model of cheap talk that distinguishes and resolves these po...

Cheap talk when interests conflict.

Most evolutionary analyses of animal communication suggest that low-cost signals can evolve only when both the signaller and the recipient rank outcomes in the same order. When there is a conflict of interest between sender and receiver, honest signals must be costly. However, recent work suggests that low-cost signals can be evolutionarily stable, even when the sender and the receiver rank out...

Cheap talk and cooperation in Stackelberg games

We carry out experiments on the Stackelberg game and the second-play Stackelberg game where the leader can revise his decision after the follower has decided. In the second-play Stackelberg game, the leader’s first announcement is cheap talk. The game settings studied include fixed pairs and random matching, and settings where the follower’s information about the leader’s payoffs is complete or...