13:30 - 15:00
Room: Floor 3, Room 319, Nature House
Chair/s:
Joep Sonnemans
Joep Sonnemans - Can Communication Mitigate Strategic Delays in Investment Timing?
Yilong Xu - Automated Market Maker vs Continuous Double Auction: An Asset Market Experiment
Marco Lambrecht - On the benefits of robo-advice in financial markets
Kinga Barrafrem - Artificial Influence: How AI Impacts Decision Disparities in Personal Finance
Can Communication Mitigate Strategic Delays in Investment Timing?
15
Presented by: Joep Sonnemans
Ayşe Gül Mermer 1, Sander Onderstal 2Joep Sonnemans 2
1 Tilburg University
2 University of Amsterdam
In economic environments, decision-makers can strategically delay irreversible investments to learn from the actions of others. This creates free-riding incentives and can lead to socially suboptimal outcomes. We experimentally examine if and how communication mitigates this free-riding problem in an investment-timing game. In our baseline investment-timing game, participants choose when to invest in a nonrival project with uncertain returns, in groups of two or four players. The earliest investor of the group bears the costs of investment while everyone in the group benefits if the project reveals high returns. If more investors invest at the same time, they share the costs. In the communication treatment, subjects can freely communicate before choosing the investment time. We find that in groups of two players, communication increases cooperation and leads to significantly earlier investments. In groups of four players, however, communication significantly reduces delay only in the first period of interaction, but not in the aggregate over all periods.