Lying aversion, lobbying, and context in a strategic communication experiment
| Published date | 01 July 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0951629813477276 |
| Date | 01 July 2013 |
| Author | William Minozzi,Jonathan Woon |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Lying aversion, lobbying, and
context in a strategic
communication experiment
Journal of Theoretical Politics
25(3) 309–337
©The Author(s) 2013
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DOI:10.1177/0951629813477276
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William Minozzi
Ohio State University, USA
Jonathan Woon
University of Pittsburgh, USA
Abstract
Almost all institutions within modern democracies depend on a mix of communication and com-
petition. However, most formal theory and experimental evidence ignores one of these two
features. We present a formal theory of communicative competition in which senders vary in
their aversion to lying, and test hypotheses from this theory using a strategic communication
experiment. To influence lying aversion, we compare a Context Condition, in which pre-play
instructions are cast in political language, with a Baseline Condition, in which all language is
abstract. We find that in early rounds of play, subjects in the Context Condition exaggerated
more as a function of their biases than those in the Baseline Condition when we control for the
past history of play. However, by the last round of play, subjects in both conditions converged
on persistent exaggeration. This finding indicates that competition crowds outlying aversion in
settings of strategic communication.
Keywords
Behavioral models; experiment; lobbying; sender–receiver games; social preferences
1. Introduction
Communication and competition are the connective tissues of modern democracy.Nearly
every democratic institution seeks to resolve some collective choice problem by divid-
ing the responsibilities of governing among branches of government, elites and the
public, candidates and the electorate, advocates and judges, lobbyists and legislators,
and experts and decision makers. These divisions do not—indeed cannot—eliminate
Corresponding author:
William Minozzi, Ohio State University, 154 N Oval Mall, Columbus, OH 43201, USA.
Email: william.minozzi@gmail.com
310 Journal of Theoretical Politics 25(3)
collective choice problems. Instead, they are transmuted into problems of agency and
information transmission. The separated institutions are then tethered back to each other
by sinews of communicative competition, in which interested actors send competing
messages to uninformed, yet empowered agents.
Despite its theoretical and practical importance, our understanding of communicative
competition is severely limited. Communication in non-competitive strategic settings is
well understood in comparison. In the basic strategic information transmission (SIT)
model, a lone sender can only credibly send coarse, categorical messages even if she has
access to fine-grained details (Crawford and Sobel, 1982; Gilligan and Krehbiel, 1987).
Dozens of studies have applied this single-sender model to democratic politics, even
though politics in democratic institutions is almost always competitive. Bankers battle
consumer advocates to influence financial regulation, scientists skirmish with skeptics
to convince the public whether climate change is a problem worthy of public attention,
petitioners confront the government over issues of equal protection and civil liberties,
and the president clashes with congressional opposition to persuade the median legislator
to support prudent fiscal policy. Competition between competing, informed interests is
pervasive. Ignoring this facet of the political world would not be so bad if it were not the
case that theoretical predictions for an isolated sender can differ markedly from those of
competing senders. For example, competing senders with privateinfor mation about their
preferences can either reveal their information or jam, directly countering the information
broadcast by their opponent (Minozzi, 2011).
As underdeveloped as our theoretical understanding of communicative competition
is, our empirical understanding is even worse. Very few studies analyze multi-sender SIT
experiments.1Single-sender SIT experiments are plentiful by comparison (e.g., Blume
et al., 1998; Crawford, 1998; Dickhaut et al., 1995; Gneezy, 2005; Lupia and McCub-
bins, 1998), although findings from these experiments have not faithfully replicated
equilibrium predictions. In fact, the fundamental single-sender SIT problem—the lack
of credible communication—is substantially reversed in the laboratory, in a phenomenon
called overcommunication, whichoccurs when senders reveal more information about the
underlying truth than the theory predicts (Blume et al., 2001; Cai and Wang, 2006). In
other words, where the theory predicts that messages reveal only categoricalinfor mation
(e.g., that the truth is ‘high’ or ‘low’), laboratory subjects instead use messages that reveal
finer-grained details (e.g., messages that vary continuously with the truth). It remains an
open question whether such overcommunication will be evident in the multi-sender SIT
experiments that more closely resemble democratic politics.
The prevailing theoretical explanation for overcommunication is pro-social prefer-
ences (Hurkens and Kartik, 2009; Sánchez-Pagés and Vorsatz,2007, 2009). For example,
subjects might be simply be averse to lying. However, explanations based on pro-
social preferences implicitly assume that individuals have fixed preferences that are
not situation-specific. Thus, some individuals may be more averse to lying than oth-
ers. However, it is not clear how such pro-social preferences will manifest in settings
with communicative competition. Moreover, an experimenter cannot simply manipulate
pro-social preferences as she might with payoffs.
One possibility is to take advantage of the idea that pro-social preferences depend
on context (Levitt and List, 2007). While we cannot directly manipulate pro-social
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