Project information
Research on Third-party Communication

People rely on others' information and guidance in various situations, including voting, medicine, or consumer behaviour. Understanding how factors such as the attributes of the third-party providing information, the content of the conveyed information, and the context of the situation influence how information receivers incorporate the information and how they act on it may hence aid a range of professionals, such as managers, doctors, or policymakers. This project will focus mainly on two different issues in third-party communication: firstly, the effect of endogenously (un)fair recommendations provided by coordination devices in coordination games, and second, the influence of selected website attributes on the perceived credibility of information published on the website. In the former case, the introduction of coordination devices is known to be a method capable of improving coordination rates, hence increasing efficiency. Yet, this may change if the recommendations are biased. The literature has focused on exogenous recommendation unfairness, which is unrealistic in many cases, as agents may be able to influence the third-party providing information. We add to the literature by designing an economic experiment allowing agents to influence the bias of the coordination device, thus introducing endogenous recommendation unfairness. In the second part of the project, we will study how credible information published on a website is perceived to be, based on two attributes of the website: its top-level domain and the presence of advertisements. To date, few papers have dealt with the impact of these attributes on a website's perceived credibility. Furthermore, the usual methods they utilised have been either qualitative or if they were quantitative, employed various types of scales, lacking monetary incentives that would induce behaviour alike to real-world decision-making. We add to the literature by creating and utilising a new incentivised method for perceived information credibility elicitation while considering the potentially heterogeneous effect advertisements may have based on the site's domain. We will focus on websites providing health-related information, but the findings will be transferable to other contexts.