We investigate models of cheap talk, information disclosure, and Bayesian persuasion, in a unified experimental framework. Our umbrella design permits the analysis of models that share the same structure regarding preferences and information, but differ in two dimensions: the rules governing...

New surveys provide a wealth of information on how economic agents form their expectations and how those expectations shape their decisions. We review recent evidence on how changes in macroeconomic expectations, particularly inflation expectations, affect households' and firms' actions. We show...

Bargaining breakdown--whether as delay, conflict, or missing trade--plagues bargaining in environments with incomplete information. Can a bargaining environment that facilitates or restricts communication alleviate these costs? We exploit a unique opportunity to study this question using real...

When is it possible for one person to persuade another to change her action? We take a mechanism design approach to this question. Taking preferences and initial beliefs as given, we introduce the notion of a persuasion mechanism: a game between Sender and Receiver defined by an information...

How does lie detection constrain the potential for one person to persuade another to change her action? We consider a model of Bayesian persuasion in which the Receiver can detect lies with positive probability. We show that the Sender lies more when the lie detection probability increases. As...