Essays in Information Conveyance

These essays investigate the limits of information transmission in economic interactions where agents’ actions serve dual purposes—both conveying private information and maximizing payoffs. I examine how this tension plays out in pricing and voting contexts, combining formal modeling with laboratory experiments. The first two essays use buyer-seller experiments to test signaling predictions from Nash equilibrium and behavioral alternatives, showing that while prices can be informative about product quality, their informativeness is constrained by incentive compatibility. The third essay analyzes existing experimental data on jury voting games, revealing similar trade-offs in strategic communication: votes, like prices, cannot simultaneously maximize payoffs and credibly transmit private information. Together, these essays show that when actions both influence outcomes and serve as signals, the resulting incentives make the signaling behavior suspect—limiting how much information can be credibly conveyed in equilibrium.