Seminario 25/05 – Juan Francisco Blázquiz Pulido (IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca & University of Alicante): Two Perspectives in Experimental Economics: From Deceptive Communication to the Development of Strategic Sophistication

Información

Who’s the deceiver? Identifying deceptive intentions in communication. Recognizing people’s deceptive intentions when communicating is crucial to detect statements that may drive us to unintended harmful decisions. This paper studies individuals’ intentions in games where players can tell the truth with deceiving purposes. In a preregistered experiment, we combine a sender-receiver game with possible strategic considerations and the associated belief elicitation questionnaire, with a sender-receiver game with no room for strategic considerations. We propose a new method that improves the identification of senders’ intentions to deceive. Our findings reveal that relying solely on the strategic sender-receiver game and the elicited beliefs, as previously proposed in the literature, can lead to misinterpreting the actual intentions of a substantial proportion of senders. In particular, our new method helps discern actual deceivers from pessimistic truth-tellers and identifies senders who try to excuse their previous deceiving message. All in all, our method identifies more senders with deceptive intentions compared to previous methods.

Unlocking strategic sophistication: How partners shape learning and its transfer. Previous research showed that people can learn to play more sophisticatedly not only by simply adapting to their counterpart’s behavior but also by becoming better at thinking strategically. However, it is still unclear how the individuals’ learning process is influenced by the reasoning level of the agents with whom they interact. Using an eye-tracking experiment, we study how different types of strategic players (naive, strategic, or other-regarding agents, previously identified) learn when interacting with the same or a different type of individual. Moreover, we investigate if an increase in strategic sophistication gained in this learning phase is transferable to a different environment or only applies to the specific setting where it has been developed. Finally, we delve into the drivers of learning by studying whether an increase in the strategic sophistication level is driven by a gain in the individual’s level of reasoning or is merely caused by belief updating.