Numerous studies suggest that communication may be a universal means to mitigate collective action problems. In this study, we challenge this view and show that the communication structure crucially determines whether communication mitigates or intensifies the problem of collective action. We...

In the dynamic game we analyze, players are the members of a fixed network. Everyone is initially endowed with an information item that he is the only player to hold. Players are offered a finite number of periods to centralize the initially dispersed items in the hands of any one member of the...

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

We study costless pre-play communication of intentions among inexperienced players. Using the level-k model of strategic thinking to describe players' beliefs, we fully characterize the effects of pre-play communication in symmetric 2×2 games. One-way communication weakly increases coordination...

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 show that essentially every communication equilibrium of any finite Bayesian game with two players can be implemented as a strategic form correlated equilibrium of an extended game, in which before choosing actions as in the Bayesian game, the players engage in a pos-sibly infinitely long...

Precedents can facilitate successful coordination within groups by reducing strategic uncertainty, but they may lead to coordination failure when two groups with diverging precedents have to interact. This paper describes an experiment to explore how such coordination failure can be mitigated...

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...

It is well known that communication often serves as a facilitator for cooperation in static games. Yet, communication can serve entirely different purposes in dynamic settings as communication during the game may work as a means for renegotiation, potentially undermining the credibility of...