Pinocchio's Pupil: Using Eyetracking and Pupil Dilation to Understand Truth Telling and Deception in Sender-Receiver Games
Joseph Tao-yi Wang, Michael Spezio, Colin F. Camerer
American Economic Review · 2010 · Volume 100 · Issue 3
Abstract
We report experiments on sender-receiver games with an incentive for senders to exaggerate. Subjects "overcommunicate" -- messages are more informative of the true state than they should be, in equilibrium. Eyetracking shows that senders look at payoffs in a way that is consistent with a level-k model. A combination of sender messages and lookup patterns predicts the true state about twice as often as predicted by equilibrium. Using these measures to infer the state would enable receiver subjects to hypothetically earn 16-21 percent more than they actually do, an economic value of 60 percent of the maximum increment. (JEL C72, C91, D82, Z13)
Keywords
Noncooperative Games, Design of Experiments: Laboratory, Individual, Asymmetric and Private Information, Economic Sociology, Economic Anthropology, Social and Economic Stratification
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