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...

This paper studies how individuals exchange information with peers and how this information circulates and spreads through informal channels, focusing on the role of the community as a bridge for information flows. I concentrate on three rural villages in Nepal where an educational radio program...

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...

We study social learning in a social network setting where agents receive independent noisy signals about the truth. Agents naïvely update beliefs by repeatedly taking weighted averages of neighbors' opinions. The weights are fixed in the sense of representing average frequency and intensity of...

We study social learning in a social network setting where agents receive independent noisy signals about the truth. Agents naïvely update beliefs by repeatedly taking weighted averages of neighbors' opinions. The weights are fixed in the sense of representing average frequency and intensity of...

I study information diffusion in a social network where a third party can control the precision of information as well as who initially receives information. Applications include spreading of news by digital media outlets, lobbyists persuading senators to contribute to a project and others. A...

In markets with search frictions, consumers can acquire information about goods either through costly search or from friends via word-of-mouth (WOM) communication. How do sellers’ market power react to a very large increase in the number of consumers’ friends with whom they engage in WOM?...

We study the information flows that arise among a set of agents with local knowledge and directed payoff interactions, which differ among pairs of agents. First, we study the equilibrium of a game where, before making decisions, agents can invest in pairwise active communication (speaking) and...

A key obstacle to coordination and cooperation in many networked environments is that behavior in each bilateral relationship is not observable to individuals outside that relationship: that is, information is local. This paper investigates when players can use communication to replicate any...

We examine how agents learn when information from original sources only reaches them after noisy relay. In the presence of random mutation of message content and transmission failures, there is a sharp threshold such that a receiver fully learns if and only if they have access to more chains...