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Third-party manipulation of conflict: an experiment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Piotr Evdokimov  and
Umberto Garfagnini
Piotr Evdokimov*
Affiliation:
ITAM, Mexico City, Mexico
Umberto Garfagnini
Affiliation:
University of Surrey, Guildford, England
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

We design a laboratory experiment in which an interested third party endowed with private information sends a public message to two conflicting players, who then make their choices. We find that third-party communication is not strategic. Nevertheless, a hawkish message by a third party makes hawkish behavior more likely while a dovish message makes it less likely. Moreover, how subjects respond to the message is largely unaffected by the third party’s incentives. We argue that our results are consistent with a focal point interpretation in the spirit of Schelling.

Keywords

Third-party communicationExperimentConflict game

JEL classification

C92: Laboratory, Group Behavior C72: Noncooperative Games D82: Asymmetric and Private Information • Mechanism Design
Type
Original Paper
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , March 2018 , pp. 27 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-017-9523-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The original version of this article was revised.

Piotr Evdokimov acknowledges the financial support of the Asociación Mexicana de Cultura A.C. Both authors thank the seminar participants at ITAM, Andrei Gomberg, Ryan Oprea, the editor, and two anonymous referees for useful comments.

An erratum to this article is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-017-9525-4.

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