| The PER Distinguished Lecture will be delivered by Professor Gary Charness. The lecture, titled “Cheap Talk and Credibility,” will explore the extent to which costless and non-binding communication (cheap talk) can be quite effective in achieving socially-desirable outcomes in strategic settings in the laboratory. Charness explains that there are different forms of cheap talk and different conditions under which these are effective. Open communication is free-form chat, while closed communication involves displaying a letter signifying one’s intended play in the underlying game. Open communication is spectacularly effective, while closed communication is much less so in our main game. There remains the issue of what determines credibility in different anonymous communication formats, which could have implications for online interactions. He will present an overview of his pioneering research in this area, and present his findings in a current paper involving experiments with different forms of communication in a network setting, varying the degree of clustering.
The lecture will be followed by a question and answer session.
Gary Charness is Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is also Director of the Experimental and Behavioral Economics Laboratory. His research focuses on experimental and behavioral economics. Charness holds a Ph.D. economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
For more information, please contact Stephanie Cohen, Program Manager at sc3867@columbia.edu |
