The paper studies incentives of low-quality sellers to disclose negative information about their product. We develop a model where one's quality can be communicated via cheap-talk messages only. This setting limits ability of high-quality sellers to separate as any communication strategy they...

This paper shows that the informativeness principle, as originally formulated by Holmstrom (1979), does not hold if the first-order approach is invalid. We introduce a "generalized informativeness principle" that takes into account non-local incentive constraints and holds generically, even...