We consider the credibility, persuasiveness, and informativeness of multidimensional cheap talk by an expert to a decision maker. We find that an expert with state-independent preferences can always make credible comparative statements that trade off the expert’s incentive to exaggerate on each dimension. Such communication benefits the expert – cheap talk is “persuasive” – if her preferences a...

We investigate situations in which agents can only communicate to each other through a chain of intermediators, for example because they have to obey institutionalized communication protocols. We assume that all involved in the communication are strategic, and might want to influence the action taken by the final receiver. The set of pure strategy equilibrium outcomes is simple to characterize,...

We consider a cheap-talk game with one sender and one receiver. If the receiver does not commit to listen to only one message, the equilibrium refinements due to Farrell [5], Grossman and Perry [7] and Matthews, OkunoFujiwara and Postlewaite [11] are no longer applicable. We discuss different notions of durability and sequential credibility when a message can later be followed by more messages,...

This paper studies a competitive cheap talk model with two senders. Each sender, who is responsible for a single project, only observes the return of his own project. Exactly one project will be implemented. Both senders share some common interests with the receiver, but at the same time have own project biases. Under simultaneous communication, all equilibria are shown to be partition equilibr...

In this paper we extend the cheap talk model of Crawford and Sobel (1982) to a multidimensional state space and policy space. We provide a characterization of equilibria. We focus on the question of feasibility of information transmission, for large degrees of conflict of interests between the sender and the receiver. We show that it is possible to construct equilibria with information transmis...

This paper analyzes information reporting by a privately informed expert concerned about being perceived to have accurate information. When the expert’s reputation is updated on the basis of the report as well as the realized state, the expert typically does not wish to truthfully reveal the signal observed. The incentives to deviate from truthtelling are characterized and shown to depend on th...

We consider a cheap-talk setting in which the sender can use information about the receiver’s preferences to tailor communication. Better information increases the persuasion ability of the sender, but also results in receiver skepticism. When the sender’s motives are transparent to the receiver, trade always relies on the sender not being too well-informed about the receiver’s preferences. In ...

We model alternating-announcements cheap talk, while discussing the efficiency consequences of explicitly allowing the ‘no-agreement’ outcome of the game with communication to vary with players’ cheap talk announcements. Our results give further consistency to the argument that a cheap talk extension does not necessarily imply efficiency in the play of the original game. Moreover, we characteri...

Dynamic cheap eagerness extends cheap eagerness by allowing the decision of whether to build a thunk or speculatively evaluate its body to be deferred until run time. We have implemented this optimi-sation in a compiler for a simple functional language and measured its eeect on a few benchmarks. It turns out that a large part of the overhead of graph reduction can be eliminated, but that run-ti...