The art of brevity

Ricardo Alonso and Heikki Rantakari

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: We analyze a class of sender-receiver games with quadratic payoffs, which includes the communication games in Alonso, Dessein and Matouschek (2008) and Rantakari (2008) as special cases, for which the receiver's maximum expected payoff when players have access to arbitrary, mediated communication protocols is attained in one-round of face-to-face, unmediated cheap talk. This result is based on the existence for these games of a communication equilibrium with an infinite number of partitions of the state space. We provide explicit expressions for the maximum expected payoff of the receiver, and illustrate its use by deriving new comparative statics of the quality of optimal communication. For instance, a shift in the underlying uncertainty that reduces expected conflict can worsen the quality of communication.

Keywords: communication equilibrium; information transmission; mediation; one-shot cheap talk (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D70 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2014-07-31
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth, nep-hpe and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Journal Article: The art of brevity (2022)
Working Paper: The art of brevity (2022)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:58681

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