Uninformed Receiver Research Articles

Strategic Communication with Lying Costs

I study a model of strategic communication between an uninformed Receiver and an informed but upwardly biased Sender. The Sender bears a cost of lying, or more broadly, of misrepresenting his private information. The main results show that inflated language naturally arises in this environment, where the Sender (almost) always claims to be of a higher type than he would with complete information. Regardless of the intensity of lying cost, there is incomplete separation, with some pooling on the highest messages. The degree of language inflation and how much information is revealed depend upon the intensity of lying cost. The analysis delivers a framework to span a class of cheap-talk and verifiable disclosure games, unifying the polar predictions they make under large conflicts of interest. I use the model to discuss how the degree of manipulability of information can affect the trade-off between delegation and communication. Copyright 2009, Wiley-Blackwell.

Cheap Talk with an Informed Receiver

This paper considers a model of strategic information transmission with an imperfectly informed receiver and provides a simple logic by which the receiver's prior knowledge becomes an impediment to efficient communication. We show that the extent of communication is severely limited as the receiver becomes more informed. Moreover, in a simple example with two signals, we show that no information can be conveyed via cheap talk for an arbitrarily small degree of preference incongruence. This result draws sharp contrast to the case with an uninformed receiver which always yields a fully separating equilibrium as long as the preferences are sufficiently congruent.

Receiver window designs for radio frequency interference suppression in DMT systems

Windowing is often applied at the DMT (discrete multitone) receiver to suppress radio frequency interference (RFI). The spectral roll-off of the window determines how neighbouring tones are affected by RFI. However, the roll-off of the window is not of equal importance in all frequency range. In particular, the roll-off in high frequency will be inconsequential when the side lobes are so small that RFI is not the dominating noise. The window is designed here to minimise total interference. The frequency response of the proposed window achieves a good trade-off in spectral roll-off between high and low frequencies. As a result, fewer tones will be dominated by RFI than in the cases of commonly used Hanning and Blackman windows, in which the stopband in high frequency are often over designed. We have considered the case for informed receiver (RFI information available to the receiver) and uninformed receiver (RFI information unavailable to the receiver). In either case, the proposed window is channel-independent and can be obtained in a closed form.

Not So Cheap Talk: A Model of Advice with Communication Costs

We model a game similar to the interaction between an academic advisor and advisee. Like the classic cheap talk setup, an informed player sends information to an uninformed receiver who is to take an action which affects the payoffs of both sender and receiver. However, unlike the classic cheap talk setup, the preferences regarding the receiver's actions are identical for both sender and receiver. Additionally, the sender incurs a communication cost which is increasing in the complexity of the message sent. We characterize the resulting equilibria. Under an additional out-of-equilibrium condition (Condition L), if preferences for sender and receiver are identical then the only equilibria are the most informative, feasible ones. A similar result appears in Chen, Kartik and Sobel (2008) when their No Incentive to Separate (NITS) condition is applied to the case where communication is costless but preferences diverge. Additionally, we model the competency of the advisee by the probability that the action is selected by mistake. We show that the informativeness of the sender is decreasing in the likelihood of the mistake. When the preferences between players diverge and when there are communication costs, we are not guaranteed uniqueness and we provide an example where an increase in communication costs can improve communication.

Informal communication

The typical sender–receiver game studied in the literature assumes that receiver is uninformed. I analyze a model where receiver has private information and sender cares to be perceived as honest. If sender's honesty concerns are strong enough, the model predicts information revelation as a unique equilibrium. This uniqueness result contrasts with the multiplicity of equilibria in games with uninformed receiver. To achieve information revelation as a unique equilibrium, receiver may have to ask for information, which is extraneous for her decision. If sender's honesty concerns are not too strong, asking for extraneous information may create an incentive for lying.

Information Transmission in Regulated Markets

The seminal papers of Vincent P. Crawford and Joel Sobel (1982) and Jerry Green and Nancy Stokey (1980) study models in which a signal about the state of the world is transmitted from a perfectly informed sender to an uninformed receiver. The authors study a model in which multiple signalers compete for consumers. The authors ask how much information is revealed; how consumers' shopping around affects this information; and how each is affected by incentives? An implication of the model is that, in a price-regulated market for health care, patients should not be prohibited from gathering more than one opinion.