Multidimensional Strategic Communication with Uncertain Salience

Abstract

In many areas where strategic communication models are applied (e.g., lobbying by interest groups), the relevant uncertainty about the sender is not over the direction of their bias, but their priority over different issues. Within a model of multidimensional cheap talk, if the salience of different issues to the sender is unknown by the receiver, the expert may use the dimensions that are of less importance (to them) in order to achieve further manipulation of the policy-maker. The sender will do this unless he is sufficiently unbiased such that he has little conflict of interest with the receiver. This is inefficient from the policy-maker’s perspective, as she will be taking a loss (relative to babbling) from the dimensions on which she is receiving “false” information. Moreover, even with two senders, one is not able to recreate the reporting mechanism of Battaglini (2002), and instead potentially ends up with less information transmission than with a single sender. I propose a novel linear tax on lobbying along different dimensions in order to align the incentives of the receiver and sender when it comes to information acquisition and cross-dimensional manipulation.