In economic environments, decision-makers can strategically delay irreversible investments to learn from the actions of others. This creates free-riding incentives and can lead to socially suboptimal outcomes. We experimentally examine if and how communication mitigates this free-riding problem...

Consumers can often allocate resources to the provision of local public goods and to the provision of global public goods. This paper reports a public goods experiment in which participants allocated tokens to a local exchange with a relatively high marginal payoff and a global exchange with a...

We experimentally investigated whether continuous-time cheap talk improves the effort level in a minimal effort game with multiple Pareto-ranked Nash equilibria. In each round of the game, a player freely changes the message before he or she makes decisions, and constantly monitors other...

We use experiments to analyze what type of communication is most effective in achieving cooperation in a simple collusion game. Consistent with the existing literature on communication and collusion, even minimal communication leads to a short run increase in collusion. However, in a limited...

The Conditional Contribution Mechanism for public good provision gives all agents the possibility to condition their contribution on the total level of contribution provided by all agents. In this experimental study the mechanism's performance is compared to the performance of the Voluntary...

One-way communication has been found to substantially increase contributions in linear voluntary contribution mechanisms. We confirm the robustness of this result in the presence of income heterogeneity. -- Public goods experiment ; Cheap talk ; Heterogeneous endowments

In this paper, we study a voluntary contribution mechanism with one-way communication. The relevance of one person's words is assessed by assigning exogenously the role of the "communicator" to one group member. Contrary to the view that the mutual exchange of promises is necessary for the...

We examine communication in a 2-player sequential public good game in which the leader has private information about the return from contributing to it. The leader decides first and the follower observes the leader's contribution, before deciding whether or not to contribute. Without...

Revealing the identities of contributors has been shown to increase cooperation in public goods games. In this paper we experimentally investigate whether this finding holds true when decisions are made by groups rather than individuals. We distinguish between groups in which members can discuss...

This paper examines whether and how cheap talk communication can facilitate within-group coordination when two unequal sized groups compete for a prize that is shared equally among members of the winning group, regardless of their (costly) contributions to the group’s success. We find that...