CHEAP TALK WITH TRANSPARENT MOTIVES

We study a model of cheap talk with one substantive assumption: The sender’s preferences are state independent. Our main observation is that such a sender gains credibility by degrading self-serving information. Using this observation, we examine the sender’s benefits from communication, assess the value of commitment, and explicitly solve for sender-optimal equilibria in three examples. A key result is a geometric characterization of the value of cheap talk, described by the quasiconcave envelope of the sender’s value function.