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Good manners: signaling social preferences

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Abstract

Certain messages, even when not directly payoff relevant, can be a credible form of communication in light of natural social preferences. Social image concerns and other-regarding preferences interact to create incentives to communicate about how one feels about other people. Recognizing the prevalence of the incentive to communicate about one’s social preferences suggests that many social and economic phenomena—from norms of etiquette to cooperation to gift exchange—should be seen, in part, as forms of signaling. These behaviors may be surprisingly robust to material costs, yet sensitive to context.

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Notes

  1. There is evidence that people also care about social norms like fairness independently of the approval or disapproval they get by conforming to or violating them, but for parsimony our model will not attempt to capture this kind of social preference.

  2. Benabou and Tirole (2006) recognize that self-image can matter as much as social image. The omission of self-image concerns from our model is solely for simplicity.

  3. Social image concerns alone also imply that people care about others’ beliefs, but to the extent that people share a common conception of a desirable image, they give everybody the same incentives, so credible communication may not frequently occur in equilibrium as individuals cannot necessarily distinguish themselves.

  4. These behaviors might also feel wrong in that they create work for one’s colleagues, but while people generally are altruistic (and so they do take this into account), they are not generally so altruistic that they would rather do work themselves that their colleagues could just as well do.

  5. Player i’s self-centered utility, as defined in Eq. (1), depends on other players’ types, but because the expectation is taken inside the function S, this utility is not equal to the expected posterior utility after discovering each other player’s type (unless S is linear). That is, we assume that people care about their beliefs about how much others like them (as they may never know for sure how others feel). Technically, we might consider this interaction a psychological game (Geanakoplos et al. 1989; Rabin 1993), but we do not require the machinery of psychological game theory. While psychological game theory allows players’ utilities to depend on a full hierarchy of beliefs about other players’ strategies, we assume that players’ utilities depend only on beliefs about a state of nature. We can still use Harsanyi’s (1967) method of positing a type space to model the interaction as a Bayesian game, only we use Eqs. (1) and (2) to define utility, rather than deriving an expected utility from utilities defined when known types interact.

  6. Farrell (1993) and Grossman and Perry (1986) prescribe attributions of a single unexpected message whereas Matthews et al. (1991) prescribe attributions of a set of unexpected messages. In general, multiple attributions may be possible. Farrell (1993) requires consistency with all possible reasonable attributions, whereas Grossman and Perry (1986) require consistency with some reasonable attribution.

  7. This definition of cheap talk does not assume that it is not credible and allows it to affect utilities if it is believed.

  8. Our result would be the same if we considered any of Matthews et al.’s (1991) announcement-proof equilibrium refinements in place of the neologism-proof refinement. We have focused on the neologism-proof equilibrium concept for simplicity of presentation, not to advocate for one solution concept over another. All of these refinements share similar intuition.

  9. Some moderately spiteful individuals may pool with the friendly types.

  10. In fact, prior knowledge that \(\lambda _j=0\) is both necessary and sufficient for \(\beta ^*=0\).

  11. Pre-play communication in public goods game actually increases generosity (cf. Sally 1995), in contrast to the dictator game, where it serves as a substitute. An important factor may be that players in the public goods game can both send and receive messages before making their contribution. Andreoni and Rao (2011)’s study of the dictator game finds that sending a message serves as a substitute for giving, but receiving a message actually increases giving. Our model does not explain why receiving a message might systematically stimulate generosity.

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Correspondence to Russell Golman.

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R. Golman thank Linda Babcock and Sudeep Bhatia for very helpful comments.

Appendix

Appendix

1.1 Additional details supporting the proof of Theorem 1

In the pooling equilibrium (which we show is not neologism-proof), player i’s utility is \(v_i^{\mathrm{pooling}} = S(\bar{\beta }) + \beta _{ij} S(\bar{\beta })\), where \(\bar{\beta }\) is the prior expectation of \(\beta _{ij}\) and we have normalized the outcome utilities to be 0. Consider an unexpected message (a neologism) that conveys that \(\beta _{ij} > \beta \) for some threshold \(\beta \). Player i’s utility from defecting from the pooling equilibrium and sending this message, if it is accepted as credible, is

$$\begin{aligned} v_i^{\mathrm{neologism}} = S\left( E_i\left( \frac{a_{ji} + \lambda _j E_j(a_{ij} \, | \, \beta _{ij}>\beta )}{1+\lambda _j}\right) \right) + \beta _{ij} S(E_j(\beta _{ij} \, | \, \beta _{ij}>\beta )). \end{aligned}$$

Clearly, if \(\beta _{ij} \approx 1\), then \(v_i^{\mathrm{neologism}} > v_i^{\mathrm{pooling}}\) (because both terms are larger). On the other hand, if \(\beta _{ij} \approx -1\), then \(v_i^{\mathrm{neologism}} < v_i^{\mathrm{pooling}}\) because

$$\begin{aligned} S\left( E_i\left( \frac{a_{ji} + \lambda _j E_j(a_{ij} \, | \, \beta _{ij}>\beta )}{1+\lambda _j}\right) \right) < S(E_j(\beta _{ij} \, | \, \beta _{ij}>\beta )). \end{aligned}$$

By the intermediate value theorem, there must exist some \(\beta \) such that \(v_i^{\mathrm{neologism}} > v_i^{\mathrm{pooling}}\) if and only if \(\beta _{ij} > \beta \). For this value of \(\beta \), the neologism is indeed credible, so the pooling equilibrium is not neologism-proof.

We obtain the (partially) separating equilibrium similarly by comparing the utilities of appearing friendly or unfriendly relative to the threshold \(\beta ^*\). Player i’s utility from appearing friendly is

$$\begin{aligned} v_i^{\mathrm{friendly}} = S\left( E_i\left( \frac{a_{ji} + \lambda _j E_j(a_{ij} \, | \, \beta _{ij}>\beta ^*)}{1+\lambda _j}\right) \right) + \beta _{ij} S(E_j(\beta _{ij} \, | \, \beta _{ij}>\beta ^*)). \end{aligned}$$

Player i’s utility from appearing unfriendly is

$$\begin{aligned} v_i^{\mathrm{unfriendly}} = S\left( E_i\left( \frac{a_{ji} + \lambda _j E_j(a_{ij} \, | \, \beta _{ij}<\beta ^*)}{1+\lambda _j}\right) \right) + \beta _{ij} S(E_j(\beta _{ij} \, | \, \beta _{ij}<\beta ^*)). \end{aligned}$$

To be an equilibrium, we require \(v_i^{\mathrm{friendly}} > v_i^{\mathrm{unfriendly}} \) if and only if \(\beta _{ij} > \beta ^*\). Seeing that \(v_i^{\mathrm{friendly}} - v_i^{\mathrm{unfriendly}} \) is increasing in \(\beta _{ij}\), an equilibrium is given by Eq. (4), which implies that \(v_i^{\mathrm{friendly}} = v_i^{\mathrm{unfriendly}} \) when \(\beta _{ij} = \beta ^*\). Once again, the intermediate value theorem guarantees that this equation has a solution.

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Golman, R. Good manners: signaling social preferences. Theory Decis 81, 73–88 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11238-015-9527-7

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