This paper reports on experiments testing the viability of markets for cheap talk information. We find that the poor quality of the information transmitted leads to a collapse of information markets. The reasons for this are surprising given the previous experimental results on cheap-talk games....

The paper reports an experimental study based on a variant of the popular Chinos game, which is used as a simple but paradigmatic instance of observational learning. There are three players, arranged in sequence, each of which wins a fixed price if she manages to guess the total number of coins...