Non-Fully Strategic Information Transmission

Abstract

Building on Crawford and Sobel's (1982) general communication model, this paper introduces the possibility that players are non-strategic. The sender might be honest, truthfully reporting private information, or the receiver might be naive, blindly implementing the sender's recommendations. In contrast to the predictions of the fullystrategic model, we show that equilibrium communication is inflated but detailed, and that the equilibrium outcome is biased in an ex-ante sense. Our findings are relevant to understanding communication by financial analysts and academic evaluators.