Dealing Rights to Speak: Mechanism Design for Communication in a Meeting.

In this paper, we propose "dealing rights to speak" as a communication mechanism for a meeting. The mechanism is designed to facilitate participants in a meeting to communicate more frankly and logically, and to equalize the amount of time each participant speaks. In the proposed simple communication mechanism, cards representing rights to speak for a certain length are used. In the mechanism, each participant is provided with a certain number of the cards. Each participant speaks for several minutes based on the number of cards he/she uses. A participant can also give some of his/her cards to other participants or throw them away if they so desire. We evaluate our proposed method through two experiments. First, we compared three conditions including free discussion, speaking in rotation, and the proposed method through an experiment. It is shown that the proposed mechanism could distribute speaking time almost equally. In addition to that, the method changed discourse qualitatively. It increased the ratio of logical speech. However, the participants rarely gave their rights to others. We discuss the reason from the viewpoint of microeconomics, and we add a voucher of rights to speak into the proposed communication mechanism to overcome the problem. In the second experiment, we compared free discussion, our proposed method and that with the voucher. It was shown that participants gave more rights to others, but the additional voucher made the mechanism more complicated and made meetings less fun. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]