This paper studies communication games in which the sender is possibly honest (who tells the truth) and the receiver is possibly naive (who follows the messages as if they were truthful) and the message space is finite. I establish the existence of a message-monotone equilibrium (in which the...

Do elementary statistics or equilibrium theory deliver any rules of thumb regarding how we should argue in debates? We suggest a framework for normative analysis of debates. In our framework, each discussant wants the audience to believe that the actual state coincides with the discussant's...

We introduce a "nestedness" relation for a general class of sender-receiver games and compare equilibrium properties, in particular the amount of information transmitted, across games that are nested. Roughly, game B is nested in game A if the players’s optimal actions are closer in game B. We...

Do elementary statistics or equilibrium theory deliver any insight regarding how we should argue in debates? We provide an answer in a model in which each discussant wants to convince the audience that a specific state holds. If the discussants' payoffs in the audience's posterior are concave...

We analyze a three-player legislative bargaining game over an ideological and a distributive decision. Legislators are privately informed about their ideological intensities, i.e., the weight placed on the ideological decision relative to the weight placed on the distributive decision....