An Experiment on the Hypothesis of Involuntary Truth-Signalling in Bargaining
通过两人不完全信息讨价还价实验，检验旁观者能否凭非自愿信号准确猜出参与者的成本情况，发现准确率略高于随机水平，但完全可由讨价还价过程的客观特征解释。
We examine face-to-face interaction in a two-person bargaining game with incomplete information in which each bargainer can either have costs to be subtracted from his/her bargaining agreement payoff or not. The bargaining events are observed by onlookers who guess the cost situations of the participants. The work of D. Gauthier (1978, Morals by Agreement. Oxford: Clarendon) and R. H. Frank (1988, Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of Emotions. New York: Norton) suggests that the onlookers' detection accuracy exceeds chance accuracy because of involuntary signals inherent in the behavior of the bargainers. It is shown that cost guesses are somewhat more accurate than chance. This effect, however, is entirely explainable by the onlookers' information about objective features of the bargaining process. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C70, C91, D70, D82.