We use laboratory experiments to study communication games with partially verifiable information. In these games, based on Glazer and Rubinstein (2004, 2006), an informed sender sends a two-dimensional message to a receiver, but only one dimension of the message can be verified. We investigate the effect of evidence and verification control using three treatments: one where messages are unverifiable, one where the receiver chooses which dimension to verify and one where the sender has this verification control. First, we find that evidence helps the receiver. Second, despite significant differences in behavior across the two verification treatments, receivers’ payoffs do not differ significantly across these treatments, suggesting they are not hurt by delegating verification control. We also show that a theoretically optimal receiver commitment strategy identified by Glazer and Rubinstein is close to being an optimal response to senders’ observed behavior in both treatments.

Is it better to present evidence first or second in trials if witnesses cannot lie, and the litigants share all available witnesses? We address this question by defining preferences over playing games via their equilibrium correspondences. Exploiting this partial ordering over games, we show that litigants cannot prefer to lead, but can prefer to follow; the judge/jury may also prefer some litigant to lead, but only if the litigants each prefer to follow. Allowing a litigant to choose whether to lead after observing the available witnesses does not benefit either that litigant or the judge/jury.

How does the incentive to engage in social signaling depend on the composition of peers? We find that an increase in the mean peer quality may either strengthen signaling incentives (keeping up with the Joneses) or weaken them (small fish in a big pond). Both right and left truncations of the distribution of peer quality reduce signaling incentives, while more dispersed peer distributions strengthen them. Finally, more right skewed peer distributions strengthen signaling incentives when only a small fraction of the group engage in signaling, but weaken them when signaling is widespread. JEL Codes: D82

We study a legislative bargaining game in which failure to agree in a given round may result in a breakdown of negotiations. In that case, each player receives an exogenous `disagreement value'. We characterize the set of stationary subgame perfect equilibria under all q-majority rules. Under unanimity rule, equilibrium payoffs are strictly increasing in disagreement values. Under all less-than-unanimity rules, expected payoffs are either decreasing or first increasing and then decreasing in disagreement values. We conduct experiments involving three players using majority and unanimity rule, finding qualitative support for several, but not all, of our main predictions. Having a high disagreement value is indeed an advantage under unanimity. Under majority, the player with the highest disagreement value is more likely to be excluded, but this does not consistently result in a lower average payoff.

I study the dynamic mechanism design problem of a monopolist selling a fixed number of service slots to randomly arriving, short-lived buyers with heterogeneous values. The fully optimal mechanism is a non-standard auction in which bidders' payoffs are non-monotone in their opponents' bids. Because its complexity may make the fully optimal mechanism too costly to implement, I also study the optimal mechanisms in restricted classes. The most restrictive are pure calendar mechanisms, which allocate service dates instead of contingent contracts. The optimal pure calendar mechanism is characterized by the opportunity costs of service slots and is implementable with a simple mechanism.