This paper reports on a series of signaling game experiments in which an informed sender can send a costly message in order to persuade an uninformed responder. We compare the behavior of two subject pools: 142 undergraduate stu- dents and 30 public affairs officials who are professionally familiar with strategic information transmission. We find some differences between the two subject pools in their roles of senders. Professional subjects behave more in line with the game-theoretic predictions, display a higher degree of separation, and earn more money. These differences are small and only weakly or marginally significant, though. Moreover, with respect to the more substantive qualitative questions regarding the impact of parameter changes and patterns of learning and adaptation we find no differences between the two subject pools. Our conclusion is that the differences are not strong and systematic enough as to invalidate experimental results obtained with student subjects.
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