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The literature on strategic communication originated with the influential cheap talk model, which precedes the Bayesian persuasion model by three decades. This model describes an interaction between two agents: sender and receiver. The sender knows some ...

This paper studies learning from multiple informed agents where each agent has a small piece of information about the unknown state of the world in the form of a noisy signal and sends a message to the principal, who then makes a decision that is not ...

Recent years have seen a growth in customized products and services. As a prerequisite for customization, private information on individual customers’ quality preferences needs to be uncovered. Sellers can listen to customers about their stated or self-...

We experimentally study information transmission by experts motivated by their reputation for being well-informed. In our game of reputational cheap talk, a reporter privately observes information about a state of the world and sends a message to an ...

We study optimal information mediation in sender-receiver communication games where the sender has transparent motives: she only cares about the receiver's actions and beliefs. An uninformed mediator cannot directly take the relevant decision in place ...

We study the robustness of cheap-talk equilibria to infinitesimal private information of the receiver in a model with a binary state-space and state-independent sender-preferences.

Researchers have often attributed discrete messages such as ratings to a difference in preferences between sender and receiver. By extending a standard model of information transmission, we show that discreteness can also arise when preferences are ...

Uncommitted reference prices can be endogenously credible because buyer search can regulate both high-cost and low-cost sellers’ incentives for deceptive communication.

Sellers may display unreasonably high prices (in high-cost oriented contexts) that are never accepted or would surely be discounted through bilateral bargaining. Conversely, general or vague prices with incredible appeals may be advertised (in low-cost ...

Problem definition: To manage supplier social responsibility (SR), some firms have adopted a self-assessment strategy whereby they ask suppliers to self-report SR capabilities. Self-reported information is difficult to verify, and this leads to an ...

Cheap-talk communication between parties with conflicting interests is common in many business and economic settings. Two distinct behavioral economics theories, the trust-embedded model and the level-k model, have emerged to explain how cheap talk works ...

We consider a large decentralized freelance platform where buyers with private information about their quality preferences are matched with freelancers that differ in quality. When posting their job requests, buyers can report their quality preferences ...

Consumers can decide whether to acquire more information about their valuations prior to purchase. In this paper, we examine pricing and advertising strategies when consumers can engage in prepurchase information acquisition. We show that consumer ...

We investigate the credibility of nonbinding preplay statements about cooperative behavior, using data from a high-stakes TV game show in which contestants play a variant on the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma. We depart from the conventional binary approach ...

This paper shows that operational flexibility interacting with informational uncertainty may lead to truthful information exchange in equilibrium even when the communication is nonbinding and unverifiable, i.e., “cheap talk.” We consider a model ...

We analyze persuasion settings in which the seller holds information abosut the customer’s preferences that can be used to tailor communication.

We consider a persuasion setting in which the sender of a message tries to elicit a desired action from a receiver by means of a compelling argument. To understand which arguments may indeed be compelling, the sender can use information about the receiver’...

We study how to use delay announcements to manage customer expectations while allowing a firm to prioritize among customers with different sensitivities to time and value. We examine this problem by developing a framework that characterizes the ...

Globally distributed collaboration requires cooperation and trust among team members. Current research suggests that informal, non-work related communication plays a positive role in developing cooperation and trust. However, the way in which teams ...

Despite the importance of mutual adaption in human relationships, online learning is not yet used during most successful human-robot interactions. The lack of online learning in HRI to date can be attributed to at least two unsolved challenges: random ...

In this work we apply methods from cryptography to enable mutually distrusting players to implement broad classes of mediated equilibria of strategic games without trusted mediation. Our implementation uses a pre-play 'cheap talk' phase, consisting of ...

Sellers often make claims about product strengths without providing evidence. Even though such claims are mere puffery, we show that they can be credible because talking up any one strength comes at the implicit trade-off of not talking up another ...