Related papers: Lying Aversion and Vague Communication: An Experim…
This paper studies lying in a novel context. Previous work has focused on situations in which people are either fully aware of the economic consequences of all available actions (e.g., die-under-cup paradigm), or they are uncertain, but…
We study voluntary disclosure with multiple biased senders who may bear costs for disclosing or concealing their private information. Under relevant assumptions, disclosures are strategic substitutes under a disclosure cost but complements…
People in the real world often possess vague knowledge of future payoffs, for which quantification is not feasible or desirable. We argue that language, with differing ability to convey vague information, plays an important but less-known…
Pervasive personal communication technologies offer the potential for important social benefits for individual users, but also the potential for significant social difficulties and costs. In research on face-to-face social interaction,…
Individuals, despite having varied life experiences and learning processes, can communicate effectively through languages. This study aims to explore the efficiency of language as a communication medium. We put forth two specific…
Senders of messages prefer to communicate uncertainty verbally (e.g., something is likely to happen) rather than numerically (such as 75%), leaving receivers with imprecise information. While it is well established that receivers translate…
I study repeated communication games between a patient sender and a sequence of receivers. The sender has persistent private information about his psychological cost of lying, and in every period, can privately observe the realization of an…
There is substantial variability in the expectations that communication partners bring into interactions, creating the potential for misunderstandings. To directly probe these gaps and our ability to overcome them, we propose a…
Honesty plays a crucial role in any situation where organisms exchange information or resources. Dishonesty can thus be expected to have damaging effects on social coherence if agents cannot trust the information or goods they receive.…
Strategic communication often relies on anchors observed by the sender but not by the receiver. An analyst may report against a proprietary valuation model, an auditor against an internal score, a manager against an accounting estimate, or…
We test whether lying aversion can steer equilibrium selection in mechanism design. In a principal-worker environment, the direct mechanism admits two dominant-strategy equilibria: the designer's target and a worker-optimal outcome. We show…
We explore whether ambiguous communication can be beneficial to the sender in a persuasion problem, when the receiver (and possibly the sender) is ambiguity averse. Our analysis highlights the necessity of using a collection of experiments…
Communication plays a major role in social systems. Effective communications, which requires transmission of the messages between individuals without disruptions or noise, can be a powerful tool to deliver intended impact. Language and…
We study the problem of an agent continuously faced with the decision of placing or not placing trust in an institution. The agent makes use of Bayesian learning in order to estimate the institution's true trustworthiness and makes the…
In recent studies of political decision-making, apparently anomalous behavior has been observed on the part of voters, in which negative information about a candidate strengthens, rather than weakens, a prior positive opinion about the…
We present a series of two studies conducted to understand user's affective states during voice-based human-machine interactions. Emphasis is placed on the cases of communication errors or failures. In particular, we are interested in…
Text messaging is the most widely used form of computer-mediated communication (CMC). Previous findings have shown that linguistic factors can reliably indicate messages as deceptive. For example, users take longer and use more words to…
A network of agents attempt to learn some unknown state of the world drawn by nature from a finite set. Agents observe private signals conditioned on the true state, and form beliefs about the unknown state accordingly. Each agent may face…
Consensus formation is investigated for multi-agent systems in which agents' beliefs are both vague and uncertain. Vagueness is represented by a third truth state meaning \emph{borderline}. This is combined with a probabilistic model of…
A framework for consensus modelling is introduced using Kleene's three valued logic as a means to express vagueness in agents' beliefs. Explicitly borderline cases are inherent to propositions involving vague concepts where sentences of a…