An Experimental Study of Truth-Telling in a Sender-Receiver Game

A recent experimental study of Cai and Wang (2005) on strategic information
transmission reveals that subjects tend to transmit more information
than predicted by the standard equilibrium analysis. To evidence
that this overcommunication phenomenon can be explained in terms of
a tension between normative social behavior and incentives for lying, we
show in a simple sender-receiver game that subjects incurring in costs to
punish liars tell the truth more often than predicted by the logit agent
quantal response equilibria whereas subjects that do not punish liars after
receiving a deceptive message play, on the aggregate, equilibrium strategies.
Thus, we can partition the subject pool into two groups, one group
of subjects with preferences for truth-telling and one taking into account
only material incentives.