In an experiment, we studied how small groups tackle a company takeover game, a task where participants deciding in isolation frequently exhibit the winner’s curse. We found that groups of three members, who could exchange opinions and chat, substantially reduced the winner's curse and...

Costless pre-play communication has been found to effectively facilitate coordination and enhance efficiency by increasing individual payoffs in games with Pareto-ranked equilibria. We report an experiment in which two groups compete in a weakest-link contest by expending costly efforts....

Schott et al. (2007) have shown that the “tragedy of the commons” can be overcome when individuals share their output equally in groups of optimal size and there is no communication. The assignment of individuals to groups as either strangers or partners does not significantly affect this...

This paper reports an experiment that examines whether groups can make better decisions than individuals in contests. Our experiment replicates previous findings that individual players significantly overbid relative to theoretical predictions, incurring substantial losses. There is high...

This paper examines whether and how communication can help groups solve coordination and free-rider problems when they compete with another group for a public-good prize. We find that when group members make an anonymous individual decision on whether or not to contribute to the group success,...

This paper studies how groups resolve disagreement when they must reach unanimity after submitting individual proposals and exchanging text-form messages via a chat window in lottery choice experiments. We find that the majority proposal does not always prevail. The minority proposal prevails...

This experimental study explores how communication influences efficiency, trust and trustworthiness in a small group when one member is left out of communication. To study this problem, we introduce a novel three-player trust game where player 1 can send any portion of his endowment to player 2....