Previous studies have shown that people believe in the existence of the “hot hand” effect: recent good performances make one more confident and lead to more good performances. However, economists have found little evidence that such an effect is present. Motivated by models of momentum from...

We examine the roles and values of honesty and advocacy in communication by studying two closely-related variants of the standard cheap-talk game. In the honesty model, the sender is behavioral and honestly reveals the state with a positive probability. In the advocacy model, the sender is...

We examine subjects’ behavior in sender–receiver games where there are gains from trade and alignment of interests in one of the two states. We elicit subjects’ beliefs, risk and other-regarding preferences. Our design also allows us to examine the behavior of subjects in both roles, to...

Confessions after failures are socially desirable. However, confessions also bear the risk of punishment. In a laboratory experiment I examine how confessions work. I analyze whether the willingness to punish harmful failures depends on how the harmed party has learned about the outcome. The...

A biased, perfectly informed expert advises a partially and privately informed decision maker using cheap-talk message. The decision maker can tell whether the state is “high” or “low” relative to a private threshold that divides the unit-interval state space into two subintervals. The...

Humans often lie strategically. We study this problem in an ultimatum game with an informed proposer and an uninformed responder, where the former can send an unverifiable statement about his endowment. A simple message game with heterogenous players with respect to lying costs shows that in...

In his classic article “An Essay on Bargaining” Schelling (1956) argues that ignorance might actually be strength rather than weakness. We test and confirm Schelling's conjecture in a simple take-it-or-leave-it bargaining experiment where the proposer can choose between two possible offers....

Players often engage in high-profile public communications to demonstrate their confidence in winning before they carry out actual competitive activities. We investigate players’ incentives to engage in such pre-contest communication. Our key assumption is that a player suffers a cost when he...

Newspaper critics’ movie reviews are often used by potential movie viewers as signals of expert quality assessment. We investigate the existence and revenue impact of racial bias in these reviews. Using an expansive, novel dataset spanning 2003–2007, we find ratings for movies with a black...

We develop a reputational cheap talk model where the principal can cancel an action initially started on the advice of an expert if she gets some unfavorable interim news. But if the status quo is reinstated, the principal is unable to verify the true state of the world. In the model, experts...