Publications
01With L. Polonio and E. Bilancini · Games and Economic Behavior, 2024
Presented at the below conferences: 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12 and 13.
Previously known as "Analyzing deception, honesty, and trustworthiness in sender-receiver games".
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Recognizing people's deceptive intentions when communicating is crucial to detect statements that may drive us to unintended harmful decisions. This paper studies individuals' intentions in games where players can tell the truth with deceiving purposes. In a preregistered experiment, we combine a sender-receiver game with possible strategic considerations and the associated belief elicitation questionnaire, with a sender-receiver game with no room for strategic considerations. We propose a new method that improves the identification of senders' intentions to deceive. Our findings reveal that relying solely on the strategic sender-receiver game and the elicited beliefs, as previously proposed in the literature, can lead to misinterpreting the actual intentions of a substantial proportion of senders. In particular, our new method helps discern actual deceivers from pessimistic truth-tellers and identifies senders who try to excuse their previous deceiving message. All in all, our method identifies more senders with deceptive intentions compared to previous methods.
Working papers
01With E. Bilancini and L. Boncinelli
Presented at the below conferences: 4, 6, 19, 20 and 21.
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We study the role of uncertainty in the evolution of conventions in coordination games when agents are myopic best responders. We introduce uncertainty of the choice environment by means of an ergodic Markov process ruling the switching across a collection of 2-player symmetric coordination games with the same strategy sets but different payoffs, referred to as scenarios. We apply stochastic stability analysis to study the selection of equilibria in the long run when there are multiple scenarios with diverse characteristics. We show that the stochastically stable states may be entirely determined by one or more scenarios that are played very rarely, so changing dramatically any prediction based exclusively on the most likely scenarios. Moreover, we show that the error model determines which scenarios play such crucial role, indicating that any abstraction from low probability scenarios should be evaluated in the light of the considered error model. Finally, we show how to compute the radius and the coradius of a convention in this setup.
Work in progress
04Shooting the Messenger? The Role of Consequences and (Dis)Honesty in Punishment
Job-market paper Single-authored · Draft soon
Presented at the below conferences: 9, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 22 and 23.
Upcoming presentation: 24.
Previously known as "Is always lying condemnable? The effect of consequences on punishing dishonesty".
Unlocking strategic sophistication: How do we learn from different individuals and transfer it to new environments?
With S. Di Guida and L. Polonio · Collecting data
Presented at the below conferences: 18.
Identity, Norms, and Anti-Social Behavior
With D. Aycinena and I. Rodríguez-Lara · Collecting data
The Role of Instructions on Strategic Sophistication
With T. Celadin, F. Panizza, E. Bilancini and L. Polonio · Drafting phase
Seminars
Department seminar at the Department of Economic Analysis at the University of Valencia (Spain), Management and Statistics (DEMS) at the University of Milan-Bicocca (Italy), Department seminar at the Economics Theory and History department (THE) at Universidad de Málaga (Spain), Internal seminar at the Rady School of Management at UCSD (United States); TBE internal seminar at the Economics department at UCSD (United States); Internal Economics seminar at the QED department at Universidad de Alicante (Spain).
