We develop a theory of conversations. Two agents with different interests take turns choosing the topic of the conversation. Talking about a single topic allows them to delve deeper, making the conversation more informative (or enjoyable). To capture this dynamic, we assume that the marginal...

This paper studies whether dissemination of private, pre-decision signals about productivity is valuable to the principal when agents work sequentially and observe each other’s effort. The benefit of dissemination is that when productivity states are correlated, each agent’s signal is useful...