讲座题目：The Market for Lemons and Liars

报告人：李学恒

报告时间：2021年05月26日（周三）14:00

报告地点：经管院A208

主办单位：武汉大学经济与管理学院数理经济与数理金融系

主持人：孙祥

内容摘要：Economists have argued that asymmetry information would lead to adverse selection, prohibiting mutually beneficial transactions. Yet, abundant experimental evidence now shows that some individuals will voluntarily and truthfully disclose private information even if it is not in their benefits to do so. Thus, voluntary truth-telling has been proposed to mitigate adverse selection. We examine this conjecture theoretically and experimentally. We consider an environment in which individuals with heterogeneous preferences for truth-telling can self-select into different markets to perform a selling task. The experiment tests the following hypotheses: (i) if naive buyers are many, individuals without lying aversion will self-select into the‘cheap-talk market’where they can send any message to the buyer; in contrast, (ii) individuals with a strong preference for truth-telling will self-select into the‘verifiable-message market’where they can send only truthful but possibly vague messages; consequently, (iii) adverse selection occurs in the cheap-talk market as if all individuals are material payoff maximizers.

主讲人简介：李学恒，2018年博士毕业于英国诺丁汉大学，研究领域包括社会经济网络和行为博弈理论，现为南京审计大学的助理教授。