SFB 303 Discussion Paper No. B - 440
Author: Ockenfels, Axel, and Reinhard Selten
Title: An Experiment on the Hypothesis of Involuntary Truth-Signalling in
Bargaining
Abstract: The paper examines face-to-face interaction in a simple
two-person bargaining
game with incomplete information about the division of a fixed sum of money
in which each
bargainer can either have costs to be subtracted from her bargaining
agreement payoff or not.
The bargaining events are observed by onlookers who make guesses of the
cost situations of
the participants. The work of Gauthier (1978) and Frank (1987, 1988), among
others, suggests
that the onlookers detection accuracy exceeds chance accuracy because of
involuntary
signals inherent in the behavior of the bargainers. It is shown that cost
guesses are somewhat
more accurate than chance, but also that this effect is entirely
explainable by the onlookers
information about objective features of the bargaining process, namely the
bargaining time
and the final result.
Keywords: bargaining, experiments, face-to-face, truth-signalling
JEL-Classification-Number: C70, C91, D70, D82
Creation-Date: September 1998
URL: ../1998/b/bonnsfb440.pdf
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