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AbstractWe use the strategy method to conduct laboratory experiments on a nine‐player heterogeneous‐cost voting game. We replicate the underdog and competition effect, but find significantly higher voter turnout rates to be only partially explained by logit quantal response equilibrium. We examine round‐by‐round changes in cut‐off behaviour and find that voters are highly responsive to historical pivotal events. Voters also respond to past winning and tying, but only as a minority (upsetting the majority), demonstrating an 'underdog winning effect', receiving extra utility when winning as a minority. An equilibrium with such asymmetry in utility explains the high minority turnout (and high majority turnout as a best response).

We report experiments on sender-receiver games with an incentive for senders to exaggerate. Subjects "overcommunicate"—messages are more informative of the true state than they should be, in equilibrium. Eyetracking shows that senders look at payoffs in a way that is consistent with a level-k model. A combination of sender messages and lookup patterns predicts the true state about twice as often as predicted by equilibrium. Using these measures to infer the state would enable receiver subjects to hypothetically earn 16–21 percent more than they actually do, an economic value of 60 percent of the maximum increment. (JEL C72, C91, D82, Z13)

We experimentally investigate the informational theory of legislative
committees (Gilligan and Krehbiel 1989). Two committee members provide policy-relevant
information to a legislature under alternative legislative rules.
Under the open rule, the legislature is free to make any decision;
under the closed rule, the legislature chooses between a member's
proposal and a status quo. We find that even in the
presence of biases, the committee members improve the legislature's
decision by providing useful information. We obtain evidence for two
additional predictions: the outlier principle,
according to which more extreme biases reduce the extent of
information transmission; and the distributional
principle, according to which the open rule is more
distributionally efficient than the closed rule. When biases are
less extreme, we find that the distributional principle dominates
the restrictive-rule principle, according to
which the closed rule is more informationally efficient. Overall,
our findings provide experimental support for Gilligan and
Krehbiel's informational theory.