Related papers: Separating the Wheat from the Chaff

When information acquisition is costly but flexible, a principal may rationally acquire information that favors one group over another. The former group faces incentives to invest in becoming productive, while the latter is discouraged from…

Strategic communication often relies on anchors observed by the sender but not by the receiver. An analyst may report against a proprietary valuation model, an auditor against an internal score, a manager against an accounting estimate, or…

We examine the strategic interaction between an expert (principal) maximizing engagement and an agent seeking swift information. Our analysis reveals: When priors align, relative patience determines optimal disclosure -- impatient agents…

We model the communication of narratives as a cheap-talk game under model uncertainty. The sender has private information about the true data generating process of publicly observable data. The receiver is uncertain about how to interpret…

We study a sequential social learning model in which there is uncertainty about the informativeness of a common signal-generating process. Rational agents arrive in order and make decisions based on the past actions of others and their…

Firms strategically disclose product information in order to attract consumers, but recipients often find it costly to process all of it, especially when products have complex features. We study a model of competitive information disclosure…

I propose a cheap-talk model in which the sender can use private messages and only cares about persuading a subset of her audience. For example, a candidate only needs to persuade a majority of the electorate in order to win an election. I…

We consider a sender-receiver game in which the receiver's action is binary and the sender's preferences are state-independent. The state is multidimensional. The receiver can select one dimension of the state to check (i.e., observe)…

This paper explores the impact of variable pragmatic competence on communicative success through simulating language learning and conversing between speakers and listeners with different levels of reasoning abilities. Through studying this…

We study expert advice under reputational incentives, with sell-side equity research as the lead application. A long-lived analyst receives a continuous private signal about a binary payoff and recommends a risky (Buy) or safe action.…

We study a model of electoral accountability and selection whereby heterogeneous voters aggregate incumbent politician's performance data into personalized signals through paying limited attention. Extreme voters' signals exhibit an…

People in the real world often possess vague knowledge of future payoffs, for which quantification is not feasible or desirable. We argue that language, with differing ability to convey vague information, plays an important but less-known…

We consider settings where an uninformed principal must hear arguments from two better-informed agents, corresponding to two possible courses of action that they argue for. The arguments are verifiable in the sense that the true state of…

A network of agents attempt to learn some unknown state of the world drawn by nature from a finite set. Agents observe private signals conditioned on the true state, and form beliefs about the unknown state accordingly. Each agent may face…

This paper considers the dynamics of cheap talk interactions between an oblivious receiver and a sender with different amounts of information. Even though it may seem that having additional information about the state of the game is always…

A principal hires an agent to acquire soft information about an unknown state. Even though neither how the agent learns nor what the agent discovers are contractible, we show the principal is unconstrained as to what information the agent…

Peer-prediction is a mechanism which elicits privately-held, non-variable information from self-interested agents---formally, truth-telling is a strict Bayes Nash equilibrium of the mechanism. The original Peer-prediction mechanism suffers…

A researcher allocates a budget of informative tests across multiple unknown attributes to influence a decision-maker. We derive the researcher's equilibrium learning strategy by solving an auxiliary single-player problem. The attribute…

I study whether and which expert incentives can be provided at what cost when the states of the world become non-contractible, but there is some noisy observation about the states that can be contracted upon. A principal hires an agent to…

When learning from others, people tend to focus their attention on those with similar views. This is often attributed to flawed reasoning, and thought to slow learning and polarize beliefs. However, we show that echo chambers are a rational…