Mantilla, Cesar (2014) Congruent Behavior without Interpersonal Commitment: Evidence from a Common Pool Resource Game. IAST working paper, n. 14-11, Toulouse

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Abstract

Abstract
Cheap talk, mainly in the form of promises, has shown to increase the efficiency in bilateral exchanges and to promote cooperation. This paper provides evidence of consistent behavior when messages aiming to directly update the recipients' second order beliefs, instead of updating first order beliefs as promises do, are exchanged. Artisanal fishermen played a common pool resource game in which they were allowed to send simultaneous non-binding recommendations to their exogenously predefined neighbors. Building a link between experimental behavior and survey data, I found that the preferences for being consistent (i.e. for minimizing the difference between the extraction
level and the outgoing recommendation) are negatively correlated with the earnings considered as satisfactory by the fishermen that took part in the study, but they are not correlated with their realized earnings