We develop a dynamic framework of strategic information transmission through cheap talk in a social network. Privately informed agents have different preferences about the action to be implemented by each agent and repeatedly communicate with their neighbors in the network. We first characterize...

If Anne knows more than Bob about the state of the world, she may or may not know what Bob thinks, but it is always possible that she does. In other words, if the distribution of Anne's belief about the state is a mean-preserving spread of the distribution of Bob's belief, we can construct...

Why do people appear to forgo information by sorting into “echo chambers”? We construct a highly tractable multi-sender, multi-receiver cheap talk game in which players choose with whom to communicate. We show that segregation into small, homogeneous groups can improve everybody’s...

A central assumption of the canonical cheap talk literature is that people misreport their private information if this is to their material benefit. Recent evidence from laboratory experiments with student subjects suggests, however, that while many people do report the payoff-maximizing...

This paper reports the results of a laboratory experiment on network formation among heterogeneous agents. The experimental design extends the basic Bala-Goyal (2000) model of network formation with decay and two-way flow of benefits by allowing for agents with lower linking costs or higher...

This paper considers a population of agents that are engaged in a listening network. The agents wish to match their actions to the true value of some uncertain (exogenous) parameter and to the actions of the other agents. Each agent begins with some initial information about the parameter and,...

We introduce two pieces of information, denoted memes, into a diffusion process in which memes are transmitted when individuals meet and forgotten at an exogenous rate. At most one meme can be transmitted at a meeting, which introduces opportunity costs in the process. Individuals differ...

This paper exploits hand-collected data on illegal insider trades to provide new evidence of the ability of standard measures of illiquidity to detect informed trading. Controlling for unobserved cross-sectional and time-series variation, sampling bias, and strategic timing of insider trades, I...

I develop a theory of intermediation in a market where agents meet bilaterally to trade and buyers cannot commit to payments. Some agents observe the past trading history of traders in the market. These informed agents can secure trades by punishing traders who previously defaulted. The...

We study private communication in social networks prior to a majority vote on two alternative policies. Some (or all) agents receive a private imperfect signal about which policy is correct. They can, but need not, recommend a policy to their neighbors in the social network prior to the vote. We...