Strategic communication: theory and experiment

Communication plays a central role in many economic decisions. The extent to which information can be meaningfully communicated depends on the interests of the parties involved. In this thesis, several instances where ´strategic communication´ plays an important role are investigated, both theoretically and experimentally. By letting participants play communication games with monetary incentives, insight is gained in the strategic reasoning of participants. The thesis considers the case in which the signaling channel is noisy, the case in which a sender can convey the information in both costless and costly messages, but prefers to come across as credible, and a job market situation where due to imperfect communication of a worker´s productivity, statistical discrimination between different groups of workers may emerge.