Suspicion and Communication

In this paper, we study how communication influences suspicion. The experiment uses a sender-receiver setup with a low probability of misaligned incentives for senders and receivers. We focus on the impact of open communication on the receivers’ suspicion as measured by the size of the deviation from the senders’ recommendation before and after the communication. Overall, communication substantially reduces suspicion, but some receivers become more suspicious during the communication. We disentangle these effects using machine learning methods to analyze the chat logs.