Pooling or Fooling? An Experiment on Signaling

This paper reports the evidence from an experiment which takes advantage of the rich informational structure of the so-called Chinos Game, a traditional parlour game played in many countries. In the experiment subjects receive a binary private signal and have to guess the sum of these signals. We compare two constant-sum versions of the Chinos Game. In one version, which we call Preemption Scenario, the first player who guesses right wins the prize. In the alternative version, called the Copycat Scenario, the last player who guesses right wins the prize. While it is straightforward to see that the Preemption Scenario has a unique and fully revealing equilibrium, in all the equilibria of the Copycat Scenario first movers optimally hide their private information. However, our experimental evidence shows that subjects “lie” in the Copycat Scenario (i.e., systematically distort behavior relative to equilibrium play) and they are successful at doing it, despite that benefits from lying are diminishing as the game proceeds.