To help incorporate natural language into economic theory, this paper does two things. First, the paper extends to imperfect information games an equilibrium concept developed for incomplete information games, so natural language can be formalized as a vehicle to convey information about actions...

Under asymmetric information, dishonest sellers lead to market unraveling in the lemons model. An additional cost of dishonesty is that language becomes cheap talk. We develop instead a model where people derive utility from actions (what they say), as well as from outcomes, so talk is costly....

Under asymmetric information, dishonest sellers lead to market unraveling in the lemons model. An additional cost of dishonesty is that language becomes cheap talk. We develop instead a model where people derive utility from actions (what they say), as well as from outcomes, so talk is costly....

Previous results on political cycles as a signal of competency assumed that opportunism was common knowledge. If opportunism is not common knowledge, there may be a partially pooling equilibrium where cycles indicate opportunism rather than competency. Insofar as more discretionality increases...