We develop a model of strategic information transmission from an outside expert with informational superiority to a group of people who make a decision by voting on a proposal. An outside expert who observes the qualities of a proposal sends a cheap talk message to decision makers with limited...

We develop a model of strategic information transmission from an expert with informational superiority to decision makers who vote on a proposal. We show that an expert's simple cheap talk strategy can be surprisingly effective in persuading decision makers by polarizing or unifying their...

We study how different forms of social capital lead to different distributions of multidimensionalopinions by affecting the channels through which individuals communicate. We develop a model to compare and contrast the evolution of opinions between societies whose members communicate through...

This paper studies when introducing verifiable communication choices between agents in a cheap-talk benchmark setting, with social tie, is beneficial to welfare. In our model agents have two ways to communicate their private information: either through a costly verifiable information (hard) link...

We analyze the interaction between the incentives for free-riding and information revelation among partners in a dynamic setting. Partners contribute to the value of a common project, but have private information about the success of their own contribution efforts. The desire to maintain a...

The paper considers the communication complexity (measured in bits or real numbers) of Nash implementation of social choice rules. A key distinction is whether we restrict to the traditional one-stage mechanisms or allow multi-stage mechanisms. For one-stage mechanisms, the paper shows that for...

Theory predicts that committees of experts may take decisions that look good but are bad and that they show a united front to impress evaluators. Although evaluators see through this behavior, committees persist in it only to avoid worse assessments. We investigate this theory in the lab, using...

Can campaign communications credibly transmit information about candidates' policy intentions? To answer this question, I develop and analyze a game-theoretic model of campaign communication in a two-candidate majority rule election with multidimensional policies. Candidate and voter preferences...

Modern central banks do not only announce the interest rate decision, they also communicate a "story" that explains why they reached the particular decision. When decisions are made by a committee, it could be difficult to find a story that is both consistent with the decision and representative...

This paper presents a laboratory experiment to measure the effect of group membership on individual behavior in modified dictator games. The results suggest that this effect is influenced by the degree of group membership saliency. A within-subject design is employed: in stage 1, each subject...