How Do Groups Speak

&

How are They Understood?

 

 

Discussion

ASSA Meetings

January 2026

Alistair Wilson

Theory Motivation

  • With a single expert disclosing evidence we can generically construct fully revealing outcomes via skepticism
  • But with disclosure by a group (with heterogeneous interests) we have to make a decision over who to be skeptical of
  • This is the opposite result from Cheap Talk, where multiple senders can theoretically lead to full revelation

 

  • From Onuchic and Ramos, the equilibrium outcomes will depend on:
    • preferences of the group members
    • how they reach decisions

Behavioral Motivation

  • We know that lab participants do not make full use of skepticism (Jin, Luca and Martin  2021)
    • This is partially mechanical as it's a boundary test, but the result is clear
  • What happens with groups where attributing blame is more complicated?
    • Are we more skeptical of participants with more decision power?
    • How does the degree of our skepticism respond to the voting rule?

Really nice Results!

  • In ordinal terms we find:
    1. Most skepticism in the individual treatments, though similar level to the Leader treatment
    2. More skepticism in Unilateral than Consensus
    3. Asymmetric updating in the Leader treatment
  • Data suggests that cognitive load is related to subjects ability to be skeptical
    • Wonder if there is a way to make this less ad hoc?

Critiques

  • A lot of the incentivized rounds do not contain informative data on skepticism, lower opportunity to learn
  • Incentives are relatively weak
    • This is almost every paper testing a theory with an expectation over an initial uniform prior
    • How robust are conclusions when we have approximate null predictions for skepticism in several treatments
  • Survey questions: not clear what they are incentivizing?
    • elicits modal belief with a uniform eqbm. posterior
  • Not clear that the Individual control is right comparison
  • With a frequentist design, I wonder if this would converge more clearly to equilibrium?
  • Would be good to make clear the contribution/identification over Behnk, Hao and Reuben (2022)

Lots of Interesting Questions Remain

  • In larger groups how much decision power is necessary for blame?
  • Is skepticism in proportion to disclosure power or does it respond asymmetrically?
  • If we have unilateral/consensus + within-group transfers what happens?
  • If we switch to a frequentist version of this would it all converge to the equilibrium outcomes?

Thank you!  🙏