Central Bank Transparency and Speculative Attacks: An Overview and Insights from a Laboratory Experiment in Tunisia

We propose the use of experimental economics as an innovative tool to introduce economic issues. The basic game of the experiment is a simple beauty contest model by Morris and Shin. Precisely, the paper contributes to the continuous debate on the effect of transparency in a context of a speculative attack using an experimental approach. In the spirit of subsequent protocols of Heinemann et al. and Cornand such as a laboratory experiment is designed to test theoretical predictions of static coordination games, players have access to heterogeneous information sets and according to which they have to decide between a risky action whose payoff depends on the decision made by the other players, and a safe action that generates a fixed gain. Results indicate perfect coordination in 61.75% of the total situations. However, non-parametric tests reveal no evidence that players really differentiate between public and private information, and of a destabilizing effect of public information due to self-fulfilling beliefs. The findings have policy implications regarding optimal tools for information disclosure. We performed the experiment on students who do not have any previous knowledge about game theory or the context.