Face-to-face communication on economic experiments. What it does and how it works

Based on the simple observation of communication being an elementary component of the everyday life including economic interactions, this thesis has two major goals. The first is to illustrate the way communication affects the human behavior using laboratory experiments (public good experiment, multiplayer ultimatum game ). The second is to parcel the effect of communication using content analysis and a specifically for this purpose developed automatic facial-expressions analysis tool.
The innovative character of the thesis is versatile. In the beginning, after replicating basic results of public good experiments with communication, the effect of economic education on
first- and second-order dilemmas are analyzed. Subsequently follows the analysis of the
permanency of the positive effect of communication (as a form of a behaviorally informed institution). While the first question aims to analyze an old standing question of the effect of
economic education, the second contributes to the recently rising research branch of spillover
effects of institutions. Further, the thesis presents a newly developed multiplayer ultimatum game enabling the analysis of fairness in groups distinguishing between the role of
information and communication. Ultimately, the thesis presents the results of a jointly
developed automatic facial-expressions software and combines these with the conducted
contents analysis of the communication protocols.