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Coordination with communication under oath

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Abstract

We focus on the design of an institutional device aimed to foster coordination through communication. We explore whether the social psychology theory of commitment, implemented via a truth-telling oath, can reduce coordination failure. Using a classic coordination game, we ask all players to sign voluntarily a truth-telling oath before playing the game with cheap talk communication. Three results emerge with commitment under oath: (1) coordination increased by nearly 50%; (2) senders’ messages were significantly more truthful and actions more efficient, and (3) receivers’ trust of messages increased.

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Notes

  1. Other seminal contributions by John Van Huyck and his colleagues to improve our understanding of coordination problems include Van Huyck et al. (1991, 1993), Battalio et al. (2001).

  2. Crawford and Sobel (1982) are the first to theoretically show how costless communication can help players reach efficient outcomes. See Sobel (2013) for a recent survey of the theoretical literature.

  3. For instance, in a classic experiment that is closely related to ours, Cooper et al. (1992) find that only 65% of outcomes are efficient during 11 periods of the stag hunt game with one-way communication. See also Charness (2000) for a discussion of these data and their replication.

  4. See Cialdini et al. (1978) for the seminal experiment, Cialdini and Sagarin (2005) for an overview and Joule and Beauvois (1998) for a comprehensive work on procedures that create commitment.

  5. In a series of experiments, Jacquemet et al. (2013) show that the oath works as a strong commitment device for preference elicitation given the oath is taken freely, expressed publicly and signed. Signed undertakings, such as the oath procedure we use here, have also been studied thoroughly in the experimental literature in social psychology. For instance, evidence from field experiments shows that people who have agreed to sign an undertaking to recycle more paper or save water and electricity become much more devoted to these tasks (see for example Pallack et al. 1980; Wang and Katsev 1990; Katzev and Wang 1994; Joule et al. 2007; Guéguen et al. 2013).

  6. The cut-off probability of decision l by player B which makes player A indifferent between actions L and R equals 0.036.

  7. This procedure, also known as rotation matching, is optimal for our experimental design: for a given number of players and the one-shot nature of each interaction between subjects, it maximizes the number of rounds. See Kamecke (1997) and Duffy and Feltovich (2002) for a related discussion.

  8. An English translation of the original instructions in French is provided in the Online Supplementary Material, Section C.

  9. The procedures are the same as in Jacquemet et al. (2013, 2016).

  10. The data for the baseline treatment come from the communication treatment of Jacquemet and Zylbersztejn (2013). These sessions have been run in July and December 2009, and in March 2010. Sessions for the oath treatment have been run in March and September 2010, and in January 2012.

  11. See Jacquemet et al. (2013, 2016); this is also a standard acceptance rate for commitment experiments (see Joule and Beauvois 1998; Burger 1999).

  12. The recruitment uses Orsee (Greiner 2015), the experiment is computerized through a software developed under Regate (Zeiliger 2000).

  13. Disciplines such as economics, engineering, management, political science, psychology, mathematics applied in social science, mathematics, computer science, sociology, biology.

  14. In our data, each subject takes ten decisions which requires that our statistical analysis controls for within-subject correlation. We do so by carrying out a specific bootstrap proportion test that consists of bootstrapping with replacement subjects and their ten decisions, rather than bootstrapping on single decisions. This allows us to account in our tests for a within-subject correlation of unknown form. Apart from this, the test is based on a standard bootstrap procedure with 9999 draws that yields an empirical bootstrap distribution of players’ sets of choices. Like in every lab implementation of the round-robin matching scheme, the second issue arising in our data is the potential between-subject correlation at the session level, since all player As interact with each player B (and vice versa). For the sake of consistency, we apply this same bootstrap testing procedure to independent observations from round 1. For round 1 observations, we also report on the standard Fisher’s exact test on both players’ decisions that relies on the independence assumption.

  15. One-sided Fisher’s exact test yields highly consistent results: \(p=.094\) and \(p=.051\).

  16. This result comes from a bootstrap version of the univariate Kolmogorov–Smirnov test. This modified test provides correct coverage even when the distributions being compared are not entirely continuous (since ratios are discrete by construction) and, unlike the traditional Kolmogorov–Smirnov test, allows for ties (see Abadie 2002; Sekhon 2011). Note that we use one observation per subject, based on the number of decisions R made by a given player A throughout the game, so that the within-subject correlation is not an issue here.

  17. Comparing the data reported in Fig. 4a, b, we clearly see that the effect of the oath has the expected direction in both cases. We furthermore suspect that the effect reported in the latter is slightly insignificant due to a relatively high baseline rate that reduces the size of the treatment effect and brings down the statistical power of difference testing. Conventional power calculation (based on a standard one-sided proportion test supporting the significance of the effect of the oath on the truth-telling ratio, with \(\alpha =5\%\)) for the data reported in Fig. 4b yields the power of 0.357. The same test performed on the data reported in Fig. 4a has a power of 0.838. We thank a referee for pointing this out.

  18. A third concern is that the oath stimulates cooperation in the communication treatment because the communication technology we use inherently lacks commitment: subjects can use neutral announcements rather than promises (Bochet and Putterman 2009; Lundquist et al. 2009). To explore this hypothesis, we designed another robustness treatment in which messages are worded as promises (with no oath). We fail to find any effect of such framing, as reported in detail in the online supplementary Material, Section B.

  19. For each of the two conditions, our data come from three sessions, involving 20 subjects each. The data for the baseline-no communication condition are taken from the baseline treatment of Jacquemet and Zylbersztejn (2013). These sessions have been run in June and December 2009, and in March 2010. The oath-no communication sessions have been run in October 2012, with all subjects but two (58/60) freely deciding to sign the oath. Among the total of 120 participants (56 males and 64 females), 105 are students—with 54 students enrolled in programs in economics, engineering, management, political science, psychology, mathematics applied in social science, mathematics, computer science, sociology, biology. Subjects’ average age is 23, 54% took part in an experiment before. The average payoff is approximately 12 Euros including the show-up fee of 5 Euros.

  20. One-sided Fisher’s exact test yields highly consistent results: \(p=.284\) and \(p=.365\).

  21. An English translation of the original instructions in French is provided as Online Supplementary Material, Section D.

  22. As reported by Hanaki et al. (2016), subjects’ inability to attain perfect efficiency is persistent across different payoff structures. They also find that the degree of inefficient behavior is related to subjects’ cognitive skills (measured by Raven’s progressive matrices test).

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Acknowledgements

This paper is a revised and extended version of GREQAM Working Paper No. 2011-49. We thank two reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version. We also thank Maria Bigoni, Juergen Bracht, Tore Ellingsen, Nobuyuki Hanaki, Alan Kirman, Ann-Kathrin Koessler, Fréderic Koessler, Rosemarie Nagel, Jens Prüfer, Sigrid Suetens, Jean-Marc Tallon, Antoine Terracol, Paolo Vanin, Marie Claire Villeval, Peyton Young and participants at several seminars and conferences for valuable comments, and Maxim Frolov for his assistance in running the experiments. We thank Ivan Ouss for his efficient research assistance. This project has received funding from the chair “Economie Publique et Développement Durable” (Aix-Marseille University), the Foundation Aix-Marseille University (research program “Mutual trust and commitment”), JSPS-ANR bilateral research grant BECOA (ANR-11-FRJA-0002), as well as the LABEX CORTEX (ANR-11-LABX-0042) of Université de Lyon, and LABEX OSE of the Paris School of Economics (ANR-10-LABX_93-01), both within the program “Investissements d’Avenir” (ANR-11-IDEX-007) operated by the French National Research Agency (ANR). NJ acknowledges the Institut Universitaire de France. A major part of this work was conducted when NJ was affiliated at Université de Lorraine (BETA), which support was much appreciated. SL thanks the MIT Sloan School of Management for its hospitality. JS thanks the University of Alaska-Anchorage for the support and hospitality. AZ is grateful to the Collège des Ecoles Doctorales de l’Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, the Alliance Program and the Columbia University Economics Department for their financial and scientific support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Paris School of Economics, University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, MSE, 106 Bd de l’hopital, 75013, Paris, France

    Nicolas Jacquemet

  2. Centre de la Vieille Charité, GREQAM-CNRS, 13236, Marseille Cedex 02, France

    Stéphane Luchini

  3. Department of Economics and Finance, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY, 82071-3985, USA

    Jason F. Shogren

  4. GATE L-SE UMR 5824, Univ Lyon, Université Lumière Lyon 2, 69131, Ecully, France

    Adam Zylbersztejn

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  1. Nicolas Jacquemet
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Correspondence to Jason F. Shogren.

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Jacquemet, N., Luchini, S., Shogren, J.F. et al. Coordination with communication under oath. Exp Econ 21, 627–649 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-016-9508-x

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