Belief Inducibility and Informativeness

Abstract

We consider a group of receivers who share a common prior on a finite state space and who observe private correlated signals that are contingent on the true state of the world. We show that, while necessary, Bayes plausibility is not sufficient for a distribution over posterior belief vectors to be inducible, and we provide a characterization of inducible distributions. We classify communication strategies as minimal, direct, and language independent, and show that any inducible distribution can be induced by a language independent communication strategy (LICS). We investigate 12 the role of the different classes of communication strategies for the amount of higher order information that is revealed to receivers. We show that the least informative communication strategy which induces a fixed distribution over posterior belief vec tors lies in the relative interior of the set of all language independent communication strategies which induce that distribution.