Competition in Costly Talk

Abstract

This paper studies a communication game between an uninformed decision maker and two perfectly informed senders with conflicting interests. Senders can misreport information at a cost that increases with the size of the misrepresentation. The main results show that equilibria where the decision maker obtains the complete-information payoff hinge on beliefs with undesirable properties. The imposition of a minimal and sensible belief structure is sufficient to generate a robust and essentially unique equilibrium with partial information transmission. A complete characterization of this equilibrium unveils the language senders use to communicate.