(Correspondent: Zhong Yiming) Dr. Xu Xue, a faculty member of School of Economics, attended the 2023 Economic Science Association World meeting (ESA World meeting) held in Lyon, France from June 26^th to June 29^th, and presented her paper “Communication in repeated games under private monitoring: An experiment” during the meeting.This paper uses laboratory experiments to test whether private signal exchange after game can improve cooperation under private monitoring, and compares repeated games under private monitoring when private signal exchange after game is introduced, non-public monitoring without information exchange, and repeated games under public monitoring.Behavioral evidence based on two game payment structures shows: when the benefit-cost ratio of cooperation is low, information exchange will improve the likelihood of cooperation in repeated games under private monitoring; When the benefit-cost ratio of cooperation is high, the impact of information exchange on cooperation is insignificant. In addition, participants tend to send truthful messages in private signal exchanges and make decisions based on the information sent by the other party as if it were a public signal, which also explains that the mechanism for information exchange and cooperation improvement is similar to that of public monitoring.

The Economic Science Association (ESA) is a professional organization devoted to using controlled experiments to learn about economic behavior. The association was founded in 1986, by Vernon L. Smith, the 2002 Nobel Prize winner in Economics. The ESA aims to bring together researchers who use experimental methods to study the economic behavior of individuals and groups. At this meeting, scholars introduced the latest research results on various topics of experimental economics such as risk, subjective beliefs, social norms and information exchange, and conducted in-depth discussions and exchanges on how to deal with the failure of experimental research and the pre-registration of experiments.