Dynamic Information Revelation in Cheap Talk

Ivanov, Maxim

doi:10.1515/bejte-2014-0017

Cited by 15 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…We restrict to multiplayer simultaneous cheap talk, as multiplayer, multiround cheap talk is very involved. For an analysis of a dynamic setting and a single informed sender, see Ivanov ().…”

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confidence: 99%

In Defense of Factions

Dewan

Squintani

2015

American J Political Sci

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We model faction formation in a world where party politicians' objective is the development of an informed program of governance. Politicians' preferences reflect their own views and their information that, when aggregated via intraparty deliberations, influences the party manifesto. By joining a faction, a politician increases the influence of its leader on the manifesto, but foregoes his individual bargaining power. For broad model specifications, we find that a faction formation process allows power to be transferred to moderate politicians. This facilitates information sharing, increasing the capacity of the party to attain its objective. These positive welfare effects may hold even when factionalism restricts intraparty dialogue, and hold a fortiori when information is freely exchanged across factions. We conclude that the existence of ideological factions may benefit a party: It provides a means to tie uninformed or extremist politicians to more moderate and informed faction leaders.A nalysis of political parties often makes use of the "unitary actor" assumption: The party is a single player with a common and known objective. While, arguably, this assumption is useful when considering certain party roles, such as bargaining over government formation, it is less so when considering others. In many democracies, for example, parties have a rich tradition of manifesto writing. In the Westminster system, which tends to produce single-party majorities, a manifesto establishes a direct mandate for governance linking pre-election promises to policies implemented post-election. Where coalition governance is the norm, there is a close link between policies proposed in the manifesto and final outcomes (Back, Debus, and Dumont 2011). Indeed, it has been argued (Budge 1987, 15) that manifestos "form genuine statements of preference rather than mere bargaining counters in negotiations." Manifesto commitments are enforced, albeit imperfectly, via party discipline, which itself relates to institutional features (e.g., the confidence procedure and party whips).The extant literature suggests two factors that are important in determining a party's program. The first is its internal factions. The second is inherent uncertainty as to which proposals allow the party to achieve its objectives. Budge, Ezrow, and McDonald (2011, 15) analyze party manifestos in 20 democracies in the postwar period and find that "parties are ideologically based and pursue their own policies, that they are internally factionalized and operating under high levels of uncertainty." In order to understand the policies proposed by a party, we therefore need to account for the balance of power between its factions and the mechanisms deployed to reduce uncertainty in manifesto writing. Here, we develop a model in which the manifesto is the outcome of bargaining between factions and where politicians' preferences over manifesto commitments are formed through intraparty deliberations.The critical and novel feature of our model is that stable party factions em...

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confidence: 99%

In Defense of Factions

Dewan

Squintani

2015

American J Political Sci

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“…The strategic case of information disclosure mechanisms (Bayesian Persuasion), where the transmitter (principal) and receiver have misaligned objectives, is in tradition of cheap talk [16,8,50,3,34,35], and signaling games [56,30]. In signaling games, the transmitter's utility depends not only on the receiver's actions, but also on his type (private information).…”

Section: Review Of Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…More general models of cheap talk, such as multidimensional sources [8], noisy communication [50] and multiple principals with misaligned objectives [3], have been studied in the literature for static settings. There are a few works that study the dynamic version of the cheap talk communication [34,35]. These works show that allowing for dynamic information transmission improves the informativeness of communication.…”

Section: Review Of Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Dynamic Information Design: A Simple Problem on Optimal Sequential Information Disclosure

Farhadi

Teneketzis

2020

SSRN Journal

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We study a dynamic information design problem in a finite-horizon setting consisting of two strategic and long-term optimizing agents, namely a principal (he) and a detector (she). The principal observes the evolution of a Markov chain that has two states, one "good" and one "bad" absorbing state, and has to decide how to sequentially disclose information to the detector. The detector's only information consists of the messages she receives from the principal. The detector's objective is to detect as accurately as possible the time of the jump from the good to the bad state. The principal's objective is to delay the detector as much as possible from detective the jump to the bad state. For this setting, we determine the optimal strategies of the principal and the detector. The detector's optimal strategy is described by time-varying thresholds on her posterior belief of the good state. We prove that it is optimal for the principal to give no information to the detector before a time threshold, run a mixed strategy to confuse the detector at the threshold time, and reveal the true state afterwards. We present an algorithm that determines both the optimal time threshold and the optimal mixed strategy that could be employed by the principal. We show, through numerical experiments, that this optimal sequential mechanism significantly outperforms any other information disclosure strategy presented in literature.or subsidies) so as to align their strategic objectives (e.g. maximization of a strategic agent's utility) with his own objective (e.g. maximization of social welfare). In this situation, the system's information structure (who knows what and when) is fixed, and the coordinator's goal is to design a mechanism that incentivizes the strategic agents to reveal their information truthfully [48].2. Information Design. In this approach, the coordinator (e.g. a central control center in a metropolitan area) knows perfectly the evolution of the system's state (e.g. the evolution of traffic in the transportation network), but the decision making (e.g. route selection) is done by the strategic agents (e.g. drivers) who have incomplete/imperfect knowledge of the state (e.g. drivers only know the traffic in their immediate vicinity). To incentivize strategic agents to take actions that are desirable for the coordinator, he can provide, sequentially over time, information about the system's state to them (e.g. provide traffic updates to selfish drivers). The goal of information provision/disclosure is the alignment of each agent's objective (e.g. minimization of the average time to reach the destination) with the coordinator's objective (e.g. minimization of the traffic in the roads). In this situation, the game-form/mechanism is fixed but the system's information structure is not fixed. It has to be designed by the coordinator through the sequential disclosure/provision of information to the strategic agents so as to serve his goal [17,59].This paper addresses an information design problem. Information design problems are ...

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“…However, we should note that the designer in this paper is not a sender because the receiver does not observe a realization drawn by the designer's signal. Third, the cheap-talk literature studies the idea of restricting the sender's information (Fischer and Stocken 2001;Ivanov 2010Ivanov , 2015Frug 2016) and sequential communication among multiple senders (Ambrus et al 2013). For example, Ivanov (2010) studies the problem of restricting the sender's information and provides a sufficient condition under which information restrictions increase the receiver's payoff.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Limiting Sender's information in Bayesian persuasion

Ichihashi

2019

Games and Economic Behavior

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This paper studies how the outcome of Bayesian persuasion depends on a sender's information. I study a game in which, prior to the sender's information disclosure, the designer can restrict the most informative signal that the sender can generate. In the binary action case, I consider arbitrary preferences of the designer and characterize all equilibrium outcomes. As a corollary, I solve a problem of how to maximize a receiver's payoffs by restricting the sender's information: Whenever the designer can increase the receiver's payoffs by restricting the sender's information, the receiver-optimal way coincides with an equilibrium of the game in which the receiver persuades the sender.

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Dynamic Information Revelation in Cheap Talk

Cited by 15 publications

References 18 publications

In Defense of Factions

In Defense of Factions

Dynamic Information Design: A Simple Problem on Optimal Sequential Information Disclosure

Limiting Sender's information in Bayesian persuasion

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