Seminar on "Mediated Talk: An Experiment"

​Theory suggests that mediation has the potential to imporve information sharing.  This paper experimentally investigates whether and how this potential can be realized.  It is the first such study in a cheap-talk environment.  We find that mediation encourages players to use (more informative) separating strategies.  Outcomes, defined as joint distributions over states and actions, gravitate toward pooling with direct talk and toward separation with mediated talk.  This difference in behavior translates into a moderate payoff advantage of mediated over direct talk.

Wooyoung LIM is Associate Professor of economocs in the School of Business and Management, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.  He received his PhD from University of Pittsburgh.  Wooyoung's research interests are game theory and experimental economics.