Cheap talk and honesty

Last registered on April 04, 2025

View Trial History

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title

Cheap talk and honesty

RCT ID

AEARCTR-0015630

Initial registration date

April 03, 2025

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published

April 04, 2025, 1:07 PM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

Country

Colombia

Region

Bogotá

Primary Investigator

Name

Tilman Fries

Affiliation

LMU Munich

Contact Primary Investigator

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Name

Daniel Parra

PI Affiliation

Pontificia Universidad Javeriana

Contact Investigator

Additional Trial Information

Status

In development

Start date

2025-03-26

End date

2025-12-31

Keywords

Behavior, Lab

Additional Keywords

Communication

JEL code(s)

C91, D83

Secondary IDs

Prior work

This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.

Abstract

We propose an experiment on cheap talk. A receiver guesses a secret number, and receives advice from a sender with misaligned incentives. Across three treatment conditions, we vary whether the sender can provide informed advice and how cognitively demanding the receiver finds it to respond to the advice in a sophisticated way. This allows us to identify how receivers reason about the sender's advice and whether honesty-related concerns can explain overcommunication and systematic belief bias.

External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation

Fries, Tilman and Daniel Parra. 2025. "Cheap talk and honesty." AEA RCT Registry. April 04. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.15630-1.0

Sponsors & Partners

Interventions

Intervention(s)

We propose an experiment on cheap talk. A receiver guesses a secret number, and receives advice from a sender with misaligned incentives. Across three treatment conditions, we vary whether the sender can provide informed advice and how cognitively demanding the receiver finds it to respond to the advice in a sophisticated way. This allows us to identify how receivers reason about the sender's advice, and whether honesty-related concerns can explain overcommunication and systematic belief bias, two key empirical patterns identified by the experimental literature (see, e.g.,Cai and Wang, 2006; Blume, Lai, and Lim, 2020; Groseclose, 2021).

Intervention (Hidden)

Intervention Start Date

2025-03-26

Intervention End Date

2025-05-31

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)

Message sent by senders, guess made by receivers.

Primary Outcomes (explanation)

See the attached pdf.

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)

See the attached pdf.

Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Senders and receivers are told that the computer randomly generated a secret number j by drawing once from {1,2,3,4,5,6,7}. The sender then chooses a number X in {1,2,3,4,5,6,7} to send to the receiver. The receiver observes the message and guesses a value for j. The sender is incentivized to induce a high guess, while the receiver has incentives to be accurate. In three treatments, we vary whether the sender can send the true secret number as a message and how coginitively demanding it is for a (subset) of receivers to make a sophisticated guess.

Experimental Design Details

See the attached pdf.

Randomization Method

Randomization into treatments by random assignment of participants to sessions, further randomization (drawing secret numbers) implemented by the experimental software (otree).

Randomization Unit

Treatments are randomized on the session level. Secret numbers are drawn on the sender-receiver-round level.

Was the treatment clustered?

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters

We will have either matching groups of size 8 or 10. The exact size of the matching groups will depend on how many participants attend each session, something we have no direct control over.

Sample size: planned number of observations

500-544

Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms

We aim to run sessions until we have observations of 70 receivers in Baseline and Expert and 66 non-decode receivers in Decode. This implies a sample size of 140 participants (70 senders and 70 receivers) in Babbling and Expert and a sample size of ca. 220 - 264 participants in Decode, depending on the average realized matching group size.

Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)

We have more than 80% power to detect an 0.16 point increase in the average guess between Baseline and Expert.

Supporting Documents and Materials

There is information in this trial unavailable to the public. Use the button below to request access.

Request Information

IRB