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Cheap talk and honesty - Experiment 2

Last registered on April 14, 2026
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Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Cheap talk and honesty - Experiment 2
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0018299
Initial registration date
April 13, 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
April 14, 2026, 9:55 AM EDT

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
Tilman Fries
Affiliation
LMU Munich
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Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Name
Daniel Parra
PI Affiliation
Pontificia Universidad Javeriana
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Additional Trial Information

Status
In development
Start date
2026-04-12
End date
2026-12-31
Keywords
Behavior, Lab
Additional Keywords
Communication
JEL code(s)
C91, D83
Secondary IDs
Prior work
This trial is based on or builds upon one or more prior RCTs.
Abstract
This is a follow-up to our initial preregistration with identifier AEARCTR-0015630. We propose an experiment on cheap talk. A receiver guesses a secret number, and receives advice from a sender with misaligned incentives. In our initial experiment we had three treatment conditions that varied whether the sender can provide informed advice and how cognitively demanding the receiver finds it to respond to the advice in a sophisticated way. We observed that receivers reacted heterogeneously to informed advice. In this follow-up, we investigate mechanisms behind the observed heterogeneous effects.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Fries, Tilman and Daniel Parra. 2026. "Cheap talk and honesty - Experiment 2." AEA RCT Registry. April 14. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.18299-1.0
Sponsors & Partners

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Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
Basic setup: A receiver guesses a secret number after receiving advice from a sender with misaligned incentives.

Expert-Rep: Replication of original Expert treatment using new receivers while recycling sender messages from the original experiment.

Belief: A treatment where instead of guessing a secret number, the receiver guesses the probability that the sender decided to send the true secret number.

FixBeliefs: A treatment where, before making a guess, the receiver observes the percentage probability that the sender decided to send the true secret number.

NoUncertainty: A treatment that takes uncertainty out of the equation by informing receivers exactly how many senders decided to send the true secret number.
Intervention Start Date
2026-04-17
Intervention End Date
2026-05-31

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
Receiver's expected root mean squared guessing error (E-RMSE)
Naive guess indicator.
Primary Outcomes (explanation)
See the attached pdf.

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
See the attached pdf.
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)
See the attached pdf.

Experimental Design

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. The treatments vary the context in which the receiver makes the guess.
Experimental Design Details
Not available
Randomization Method
Randomization into treatments by random assignment of participants to sessions, further randomization (matching receivers to past senders) implemented by the experimental software (otree).
Randomization Unit
Treatments are randomized on the session level.
Was the treatment clustered?
No

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
We will have 305 receivers playing for 24 rounds. Each receiver is one cluster.
Sample size: planned number of observations
305 participants
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
We will collect 70 receivers in Expert-Rep, Belief, and NoUncertainty and 95 receivers in FixedBelief.
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
More than 80% power to find a 0.13 point reduction in the E-RMSE between two treatments.
Supporting Documents and Materials
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
COMITÉ DE INVESTIGACIÓN Y ÉTICA DE LA FACULTAD DE CIENCIAS ECONOMICAS Y ADMINISTRATIVAS DE LA PONTIFICIA UNIVERSIDAD JAVERIANA
IRB Approval Date
2023-03-16
IRB Approval Number
FCEA-DF-0053-2023
Analysis Plan