Consider an uninformed decision maker (DM) who communicates with a partially informed speaker (S) through cheap talk. DM can choose a project to implement or the outside option of no project. We show that if the agents' ex-ante rankings over projects do not coincide, then this conflict of...

In Crawford and Sobel (1982) (CS), a sender (S) uses cheap talk to persuade a receiver (R) to select an action as profitable to S as possible. This paper shows that the presence of an outside option – that is, allowing R to avoid taking any action, yielding state-independent reservation...

A decision maker (DM) must choose between two projects or decide on no project. The expected benefits of these projects are correlated. The DM seeks advice from an agent with private information about the projects' benefits. However, the agent's divergent preferences for projects and lack of...