Strategic Communication : Theoretical and Experimental Investigations – StratCom

Study a series of communication games between a transmitter and a receiver by varying the incentives of the issuer to analyze the determinants of behavior of both types of actors.

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The importance of hard information for communication has been growing with recent technological evolutions as information is becoming more easily verifiable, and more data becomes available to individuals, firms and public institutions. I seek to increase our understanding of strategic communication and information design, both from a theoretical and an experimental perspective, with a focus on hard information.

The first part of this proposal is concerned with the design of mechanisms with evidence. In practice, individuals often have access to evidence, yet most of the mechanism design literature assumes cheap talk communication between the privately informed participants and the principal. I will assume that privately informed agents can communicate with evidence. I will study implementation of a social choice function, with applications to several familiar mechanism design problems, including matching, bilateral trade and auctions.

The second part develops an experimental approach to strategic communication with evidence. In a first project I will study a series of sender-receiver games with varying incentives for the sender, with the goal of understanding the determinants of sender and receiver behavior. In a second project, I will study deliberation with evidence before voting, with the goal of understanding how voting rules and incentives affect communication, and how deliberation changes the effects of voting rules. Other projects will consider additional strategic situations, and introduce new aspects such as dynamics.

The last part analyses the value of additional information to decision makers that are already strategically informed by a biased adviser. In the absence of an adviser, any additional information benefits the decision maker. But an adviser who knows that additional information is available may decide to be less informative, so that the decision maker may end up worse off. I intend to characterize when this is the case.