Looking into Crystal Balls: A Laboratory Experiment on Reputational Cheap Talk
通过实验室实验研究专家在声誉激励下如何传递信息，发现即使诚实传递是均衡策略，谎报仍普遍存在；不确定性越高，专家越可能诚实；评估者难以学习专家策略，且对消息准确性的反应与理论预测相反。
We experimentally study information transmission by experts motivated by their reputation for being well-informed. In our game of reputational cheap talk, a reporter privately observes information about a state of the world and sends a message to an evaluator; the evaluator uses the message and the realized state of the world to assess the reporter’s informativeness. We manipulate the key driver of misreporting incentives: the uncertainty about the phenomenon to forecast. We highlight three findings. First, misreporting information is pervasive even when truthful information transmission can be an equilibrium strategy. Second, consistent with the theory, reporters are more likely to transmit information truthfully when there is more uncertainty on the state. Third, evaluators have difficulty learning reporters’ strategies and, contrary to the theory, assessments react more strongly to message accuracy when reporters are more likely to misreport. In a simpler environment with computerized evaluators, reporters learn to best reply to evaluators’ behavior and, when the state is highly uncertain and evaluators are credulous, to transmit information truthfully. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: Financial support from the H2020 European Research Council [Grant 295835 (EVALIDEA)] is gratefully acknowledged. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4629 .