Econ Papers Daily / 期刊论文
关于可验证廉价谈话与社会福利
On verifiable cheap talk and social welfare
摘要
We consider a standard model of cheap talk when the receiver has the option to verify the sender’s message at some cost. Verification entails a trade-off for the receiver: learning the state perfectly versus not paying the cost of verifying. An equilibrium partition consists of a mix of verified and unverified intervals, similar in structure to Bijkerk et al. (2018). We analyze a subset of equilibria with exactly one unverified interval. Fixing the informativeness of the equilibrium and the bias between sender and receiver, we show that, for a small bias, joint welfare is non-monotonic in the cost of verification, and for larger biases, it is always increasing in the cost of verification. Further, when costs decrease to the point where informativeness increases, welfare increases discontinuously. Finally, joint welfare is also non-monotonic in the bias between the sender and receiver. Our results suggest that the introduction of a verification technology may have both non-monotonic and discontinuous effects on societal welfare, depending on its cost and the conflict of interest between the agents.
中文摘要
我们考虑一个标准的廉价交谈模型，其中接收者可以选择支付一定成本来验证发送者的信息。验证对接收者而言涉及一种权衡：完美了解状态与不支付验证成本之间的选择。均衡分割由已验证和未验证区间的混合构成，其结构与Bijkerk等人（2018）类似。我们分析了一类恰好包含一个未验证区间的均衡子集。在固定均衡的信息量和发送者与接收者之间的偏差时，我们证明，对于较小的偏差，联合福利在验证成本上是非单调的；而对于较大的偏差，联合福利总是随验证成本增加而增加。此外，当成本降低到信息量增加的程度时，福利会不连续地上升。最后，联合福利在发送者与接收者之间的偏差上也是非单调的。我们的结果表明，验证技术的引入可能对社会福利产生非单调且不连续的影响，这取决于其成本以及双方之间的利益冲突。