CEF.UP – ECO Seminar/Webinar

Tuesday – October 24^th, 2023, at 1:00 p.m. | Room 305| Online

“Communication through biased intermediators”

Francisco Silva  –  Department of Economics, Deakin University

Abstract:

“We study biased intermediated communication between a sender and a receiver. We prove that the information that can be transmitted from the sender to the receiver is exactly the same as with direct (non-mediated) communication, provided there are (at least) two intermediators who do not communicate with each other. In that sense, the sender is not harmed by not being able to communicate with the receiver directly. This is the case even if the sender does not know the agents’ biases and regardless of the rules of communication (cheap talk, bayesian persuasion, etc.). We discuss the implications of our results to a related information design problem, where a decision maker designs the statistical experiment to be performed by a possibly biased agent. We show that, if the decision maker is able to manipulate the data without causing any statistical loss, she can implement her preferred statistical experiment despite the agent being biased. If, however, manipulating the data has a statistical cost, then strategies that reduce the overall informativeness of the experiment (like reducing the sample) might actually be (second-best) optimal for the decision maker, because they may require less costly manipulation in order to dissuade biased agents from misreporting. We discuss these ideas in the context of medical research.”