Competition in Costly Talk
Theoretical Economics
2023-04-17 v2
Abstract
This paper studies a communication game between an uninformed decision maker and two perfectly informed senders with conflicting interests. Senders can misreport information at a cost that increases with the size of the misrepresentation. The main results show that equilibria where the decision maker obtains the complete-information payoff hinge on beliefs with undesirable properties. The imposition of a minimal and sensible belief structure is sufficient to generate a robust and essentially unique equilibrium with partial information transmission. A complete characterization of this equilibrium unveils the language senders use to communicate.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2103.05317,
title = {Competition in Costly Talk},
author = {Federico Vaccari},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.05317},
year = {2023}
}