Cheap Talk, Round Numbers, and the Economics of NegotiationMatthew Backus, Tom Blake, Steven Tadelis
NBER Working Paper No. 21285 Can sellers credibly signal their private information to reduce frictions in negotiations? Guided by a simple cheap-talk model, we posit that impatient sellers use round numbers to signal their willingness to cut prices in order to sell faster, and test its implications using millions of online bargaining interactions. Items listed at multiples of $100 receive offers that are 5% - 8% lower but that arrive 6 - 11 days sooner than listings at neighboring "precise" values, and are 3% - 5% more likely to sell. Similar patterns in real estate transactions suggest that round-number signaling plays a broader role in negotiations. A non-technical summary of this paper is available in the September 2015 NBER Digest.
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Acknowledgments and Disclosures Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w21285 Users who downloaded this paper also downloaded* these:
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