Additional Experiment Treatment for “Communication, Guilt, and Agency Risk with Payoff Externalities”

Last registered on February 18, 2026
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Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Additional Experiment Treatment for “Communication, Guilt, and Agency Risk with Payoff Externalities”
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0017867
Initial registration date
February 10, 2026

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
February 18, 2026, 5:46 AM EST

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

Locations

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Primary Investigator

Name
Timothy Cason
Affiliation
Purdue University
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Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Name
Lana Friesen
PI Affiliation
University of Queensland
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PI Name
Lata Gangadharan
PI Affiliation
Monash University
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Additional Trial Information

Status
In development
Start date
2026-02-10
End date
2026-12-31
Keywords
Behavior, Lab
Additional Keywords
Guilt aversion, principal-agent, trust
JEL code(s)
Secondary IDs
Prior work
This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.
Abstract
Communication is effective in enhancing cooperation in strategic settings. This study examines situations where actions of principals and agents not only affect payoffs within the agency relationship but also have payoff externalities impacting others. Social efficiency is maximized only if all parties cooperate. We design an experiment to investigate how different types of communication affect cooperation and efficiency. Communication is hypothesized to impact beliefs, which affect the psychological costs, in particular, guilt, of choosing certain actions. It may also reduce social distance and enhance fairness concerns. A baseline treatment allows no communication opportunities. Three communication treatments introduce (a) a single, private message from the agent to the principal in each pair; and additionally, (b) private chat between the agent and principal within pairs, and (c) chat between all agents and principals whose payoffs are affected by actions. Participants provide complete, incentivized first and second order beliefs.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Cason, Timothy, Lana Friesen and Lata Gangadharan. 2026. "Additional Experiment Treatment for “Communication, Guilt, and Agency Risk with Payoff Externalities”." AEA RCT Registry. February 18. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.17867-1.0
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Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
Communication opportunities will be varied across treatments. This includes a no-communication baseline, and treatments in which the agent in each pair can send a single, private message to their principal before choices are made, as well as rich and free form (chat) communication between both agents and both principals whose payoffs are affected by actions. The initial results indicate a large difference in cooperative actions from the group chat. This preregistration adds a new treatment to help identify the reasons for this large treatment effect, which allows for rich and free form (chat) communication between only the agent and principal within each principal-agent pair. Following this dialog, the agent in each pair can send a single, private message to their principal.
Intervention Start Date
2026-02-11
Intervention End Date
2026-05-03

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
Cooperation choices (frequency of IN for principals, and HIGH for agents)
Overall group cooperation rates (both principals choose IN and both agents choose HIGH in the four-person set of principal-agent pairs)
First-order beliefs
Second-order beliefs
Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Communication content
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
This is a laboratory experiment, conducted in a standard university experimental economics lab, recruiting students broadly across the university. Subjects will be randomly assigned to treatments, and then randomly assigned to roles (agents or principals) and into pairs to make a choice.
Within each principal-agent pair, the principal chooses IN or OUT and the agent chooses HIGH or LOW (effort). The OUT choice corresponds to an outside option for which the agent’s choice is irrelevant; the IN choice leads the pair’s earnings to depend on the agent’s effort choice. These choices have payoff externalities for one other principal-agent pair, so final earnings depend on the binary choices of four subjects in each group. Efficient cooperation is achieved only if both principals choose IN and both agents choose HIGH.
Experimental Design Details
Not available
Randomization Method
Subjects will be recruited by email using ORSEE. No subject will be able to participate in more than one session, either in the original treatments or the new treatment preregistered here. But the email addresses for invitations to participate in the new treatment are drawn randomly from the same ORSEE subject database of over 5,000 subjects used in the original treatments conducted for this study, leading to a random assignment of subjects to treatments.
Randomization Unit
Individual
Was the treatment clustered?
Yes

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
30 groups of 4 subjects
Sample size: planned number of observations
120 individuals
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
120 individuals in the pair chat treatment
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
Based on data collection in the earlier treatments, a proportion of cooperative IN/HIGH decisions that differ 0.3 between communication treatments can be detected with 80 percent power (5-percent significance level two-tailed).
Supporting Documents and Materials
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
Purdue University Institutional Review Board
IRB Approval Date
2018-08-07
IRB Approval Number
1902021679
Analysis Plan