Anonymity, Equal Treatment, and Overconfidence: Constraints on Communication May Enhance Information Transmission

Kohei Kawamura ()

No 268, Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper offers a simple but rich framework to study communication subject to various constraints such as anonymity requirements, equal treatment of multiple agents, overconfidence of an expert, and garbling, by extending the cheap talk model of Crawford and Sobel (1982). Common to these seemingly distinct types of constraints in communication is that the action by a decision maker is less sensitive to a message than without such constraints. Reduced sensitivity can alter the structure of informative equilibria dramatically, and leads to a type of informational distortion, termed incentives to exaggerate, which differs qualitatively from the well-known incentives to overstate/understate. We demonstrate that the two different types of distortion may partly offset each other, so the introduction of the costraints may be beneficial when the level to conflict between communicating parties is large. Our model can also be applied to study communication in public good provision where equal treatment is often implicitly assumed.

Keywords: Cheap Talk; Anonymity; Overconfidence; Equal Treatment; Public Good Provision; Noisy Communication; Exaggeration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D71 D82 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-06-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1) Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:448ce7ce-fbb3-4212-bf69-33d6db658a11 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oxf:wpaper:268

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anne Pouliquen ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).