Ettinger David, Jehiel Philippe
Université Paris-Dauphine, PSL Research University, CNRS, IRD, LEDa, 75016 Paris, France.
PSE, 48 Boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris, France.
Exp Econ. 2021;24(3):821-853. doi: 10.1007/s10683-020-09681-9. Epub 2020 Dec 1.
An experiment is designed to shed light on how deception works. The experiment involves a twenty period sender/receiver game in which period 5 has more weight than other periods. In each period, the informed sender communicates about the realized state, the receiver then reports a belief about the state before being informed whether the sender lied. Throughout the interaction, a receiver is matched with the same sender who is either malevolent with an objective opposed to the receiver or benevolent always telling the truth. The main findings are: (1) in several variants (differing in the weight of the key period and the share of benevolent senders), the deceptive tactic in which malevolent senders tell the truth up to the key period and then lie at the key period is used roughly 25% of the time, (2) the deceptive tactic brings higher expected payoff than other observed strategies, and (3) a majority of receivers do not show cautiousness at the key period when no lie was made before. These observations do not match the predictions of the Sequential Equilibrium and can be organized using the analogy-based sequential equilibrium (ABSE) in which three quarters of subjects reason coarsely.
设计了一项实验以阐明欺骗是如何起作用的。该实验涉及一个二十轮的发送者/接收者博弈，其中第5轮比其他轮次权重更大。在每一轮中，知情的发送者传达已实现的状态，接收者随后报告对该状态的信念，之后才得知发送者是否说谎。在整个互动过程中，一个接收者与同一个发送者配对，该发送者要么心怀恶意，其目标与接收者相悖，要么心怀善意，总是说实话。主要发现如下：（1）在几个变体中（关键轮次的权重和善意发送者的比例不同），恶意发送者在关键轮次之前说实话然后在关键轮次说谎的欺骗策略大约有25%的使用频率，（2）该欺骗策略带来的预期收益高于其他观察到的策略，（3）大多数接收者在关键轮次没有之前未说谎的情况下没有表现出谨慎。这些观察结果与序贯均衡的预测不相符，可以用基于类比的序贯均衡（ABSE）来解释，其中四分之三的受试者进行粗略推理。
