CeDEx Brown Bag Seminar - Pierce Gately

Pierce Gately will present joint work with Kieran Stockley

Title: (Mis)Information from Third Parties and Co-operation.

Abstract: Many of the most pressing social dilemmas facing the world are characterised by uncertainty with potential outcomes difficult to precisely quantify. Yet third parties, generally with an interest in the outcome, often communicate potential risks and benefits to the wider public serving as a coordinating device for behaviour on a large scale. We propose a series of experiments in which third parties transmit information to other players. Concentrating on the cornerstone of research on cooperation dilemmas, the public goods game, we consider the case where the benefits from the public good are unknown to the group, but are known by a third party who can communicate (truthfully or not) said benefits to the group. The third party may be incentivised to promote cooperative or selfish actions. A baseline experiment considers a one-shot public goods game to examine how the level of reported benefits by the third-party effects contributions to the public good. Follow-up experiments will consider a dynamic public goods game to explore how the effects of reports manifest themselves in repeated interactions when group members can learn or infer something about the veracity of the report through experience.