An experiment is designed to shed light on how deception works. The experiment involves a twenty period sender/receiver game in which period 5 has more weight than other periods. In each period, the informed sender communicates about the realized state, the receiver then reports a belief about the state before being informed whether the sender lied. Throughout the interaction, a receiver is matched with the same sender who is either malevolent with an objective opposed to the receiver or benevolent always telling the truth. The main findings are: (1) in several variants (differing in the weight of the key period and the share of benevolent senders), the deceptive tactic in which malevolent senders tell the truth up to the key period and then lie at the key period is used roughly 25% of the time, (2) the deceptive tactic brings higher expected payoff than other observed strategies, and (3) a majority of receivers do not show cautiousness at the key period when no lie was made before. These observations do not match the predictions of the Sequential Equilibrium and can be organized using the analogy-based sequential equilibrium (ABSE) in which three quarters of subjects reason coarsely.

一项实验旨在阐明欺骗的工作原理。该实验涉及二十个周期的发送方/接收方博弈，其中周期 5 的权重高于其他周期。在每个时期，被告知的发送者就实现的状态进行通信，然后接收者在被告知发送者是否撒谎之前报告对状态的信念。在整个交互过程中，接收者与同一发送者相匹配，后者要么是恶意的，目标与接收者相反，要么是仁慈的总是说实话。主要发现是：（1）在几个变种中（关键时期的权重和善意发送者的份额不同），恶意发送者在关键时期说实话然后在关键时期撒谎的欺骗策略大约使用 25% 的时间，（2）欺骗策略比其他观察到的策略带来更高的预期回报，（3）大多数接收者在之前没有撒谎的关键时期没有表现出谨慎。这些观察结果与顺序均衡的预测不匹配，可以使用基于类比的顺序均衡 (ABSE) 进行组织，其中四分之三的受试者进行粗略推理。