This paper studies the effect of disclosing conflicts of interest on strategic communication when the sender has lying costs. I present a simple economic mechanism under which such disclosure often leads to more informative and, at the same time, also to more biased messages. This benefits...

This article argues that more emphasis should be paid to the communicative power of trade unionism because it may constitute a starting point or a privileged standpoint which a trade union may use to counter its weakness regarding its other sources of power. Reviewing the trade union...

We here develop a model of pre-play communication that generalizes the cheap-talk approach by allowing players to have a lexicographic preference, second to the payoffs in the underlying game, for honesty. We formalize this by way of an honesty (or truth) correspondence between actions and...

In most firms, if not all, workers are divided asymmetrically in terms of authority and responsibility. In this paper, we view the asymmetric allocations of authority and responsibility as essential features of hierarchy and examine why hierarchies often prevail in organizations from that...

Communication always takes place by means of symbols. Information must be coded by the sender, i.e. expressed by the use of symbols (mostly language symbols), and then decoded by the recipient. The process of message decoding may be divided into two stages: the acquisition and the interpretation...

Human communication in organizations often involves a large amount of gossiping about others. Here we study in an experiment whether gossip affects the efficiency of human interactions. We let subjects play a trust game. Third parties observe a trustee's behavior and can gossip about it by...

In corporate practice, incentive schemes are often complicated even for simple tasks. Hence, the way they are communicated might matter. In a controlled field experiment, we study a minimally invasive change in the communication of a well-established incentive scheme - a reminder regarding the...