时间：2025年6月16日（周一）13:30-15:00

地点：科研楼1115

主讲人：周维萱，中国传媒大学

主持人：赵昕，eSports电竞数据网提供专业

题目：Knowing More Can Hurt: An Experiment

主讲人简介：Weixuan Zhou is an assistant professor at School of Economics and Management, Communication University of China. His research interests are experimental economics, industrial organization and applied microeconomics theory, with a focus on information provision, transmission and acquisition.

Abstract: Theory suggests that mandatory disclosure of private interest can be harmful, as it deters the transmission of private information. Previous experiments, however, show that disclosing private interest can be beneficial through the psychological effects of moral licensing and insinuation anxiety. We conducted an experiment to investigate the effect of information disclosure in the setting of strategic information transmission with unknown motives. Our experimental design captures the core spirit of Li and Madarasz (2008), in which a sender has partially aligned interests with a receiver and has private information about his own bias and the state. We show that disclosing private interest results in an essentially unique babbling equilibrium, whereas informative equilibria exist when the private interest is hidden. We then use neologism-proofness and a best-response dynamics approach to sharpen the theoretical prediction. Our experimental evidence provides support for the theory, as we find that hidden information facilitates information transmission and improves welfare. Meanwhile, our experimental data are inconsistent with the phenomena of moral licensing and insinuation anxiety. We perform a level-k analysis as an attempt to explain the payoff differences within and across treatments, and find that a possible source of the welfare loss when the private interest is disclosed is the mismatch between senders and receivers with different levels of sophistication.