Experimental Design
Our experiment matches two subjects who take the role of either the sender or the receiver. Receivers are first asked for their belief on whether the unemployment rate in a US state and the crime rate in another US state was lower during the Obama or the Trump administration. The two questions are presented in a random order. Participants know that one question will be randomly chosen to be payoff relevant. For each question, we also ask them how certain they are that their belief is correct. Receivers know that they maximize their expected payoff by indicating their actual degree of certainty. We then match each receiver with one sender. Senders know the correct answers. For each domain, they can send one out of two possible messages suggesting that the correct answer is “Obama administration” or “Trump administration” to the receiver they are matched with. We inform receivers that senders know the correct answers but do not need to report truthfully. After receivers observed the sender’s message, they can change their beliefs, still knowing that announcing their actual degree of certainty maximizes their expected payoff. To elicit the receivers’ responses to the senders’ messages, we use the strategy-method: Receivers have to indicate whether or not and how much to change their initial beliefs for each of the two possible messages of the sender. Payoffs are calculated based on the message the sender actually sent.
In the post-experimental questionnaire, we elicit basic demographic information and personal attitudes, such as their political affiliation.
We have two main treatments that differ in the senders’ incentives:
• In treatment OBAMA, the sender gets a bonus if and only if the receiver, after having received the message, announces that “Obama administration” is the correct answer.
• In treatment TRUMP, the sender gets a bonus if and only if the receiver, after having received the message, announces that “Trump administration” is the correct answer.
We have two additional treatments where we inform receivers about the message the sender they are matched with sent in a previous experiment. The crucial difference is that receivers know that the sender’s payoff is independent of what they announce. This is done to avoid that the receivers’ behavior is confounded by caring about the senders’ payoffs.
We use a between-subject design. Each subject, hence, participates in only one treatment and plays only one role. The experiment will be conducted online and participants will be recruited using Amazon Mechanical Turk. We will require that participants are located in the US and that they show a HIT approval rate of at least 95%. Participants who answered the majority of our comprehension questions incorrectly will not be allowed to continue, and will hence be excluded from our sample.