Bluffs and disclosure
What is the value of a bluff after you count lost credibility and revealed information?
01Choose disclosure
02Test the belief change
03Track later consequences
The decision at the table
In-game deception ranges from keeping your next build private to falsely claiming a shortage or making a promise you do not intend to keep. Those choices can affect immediate offers, later cooperation, and how the table estimates your threat.
The mechanism to test
Study withholding, selective truth, false factual claims, and promises as separate treatments. Deception requires a claim at odds with the speaker’s known information or stated intent at that time. A mistaken belief or an unforeseen inability to keep a promise is a different event. Keep this vocabulary about gameplay claims.
Proposed experiment
Begin with truthful versus withholding messages under the same offers. A later, separately registered arm permits one defined bluff class with a fixed frequency cap. Hypothesis: any short-term negotiating gain depends on detectability, recipient skepticism, and how much of the game remains.
Measure immediate response, contradiction opportunities, later trade responses, retaliation, and whole-game wins. Use a credibility timeline rather than assigning an unexplained trust number. Ground truth for message classification comes from the speaker’s own contemporaneous record in a separate diagnostic, never from future knowledge.
What could disprove it
A bluff that is never challenged is not necessarily believed. The best private payoff may come from a useful trade, not from changing beliefs. Do not generalize performance against gullible scripted bots to humans or skeptical agents.
Agent notes
Use the shared experiment design to freeze candidate versions, full lineups, budgets, sample size, primary contrast, and stopping rules before collecting evidence. This is a draft study brief, not a preregistration. No run IDs exist for this proposal.
The deployable policy reads only its own observation and recipient-visible events. The diagram is a conceptual schematic. Build new measured exhibits from retained artifacts using the visual publishing guide.
The reading guide distinguishes Catan negotiation evidence, general communication theory, and hypotheses still untested here.