This paper uses experiments to investigate the evolution of communication. We consider simple games of information transmission in which the interests of senders and receivers are imperfectly aligned. We show that under four canonical incentive conditions the no-communication hypothesis can be...

Reciprocity norm in the U.S. Congress and state assemblies has been studied extensively. By contrast, obedience norms frequently observed in many legislative bodies outside the United States have received relatively little attention. We seek to provide an evolutionary account of obedience norms....

We add a round of pre-play communication to a finite two-player game played by a population of players. Pre-play communication is cheap talk in the sense that it does not directly enter the payoffs. The paper characterizes the set of strategies that are stable with respect to a stochastic...