Cheap Talk With Global Unknown Misalignment

The present study analyzes a cheap talk game engaged by two players, where one is endowed with some information and transmits it to the other. Communication about such information state is performed with costless messages and no effort in retriev ing the information. Both players have a personal type of preferences over the application of the information state into an action. However, each one knows only her own type, while the others is unknown. Therefore, the receiver and the sender of the information state do not know the real preferences difference. Both players utility depend on the action taken at the end of the game by the receiver, where such action is based on the information transmitted. In the model, it is included a communication stage before cheap talk is performed, where the players signal each other their individual types, with which the game proceeds in the style of Crawford and Sobel (1982) model. The results of the proposed game are based in the ex ante expected utility of the players (before the sender is endowed with the information state knowledge), and they show that whenever the players’ distributio n of preferences satisfy certain conditions, informational communication is attainable even when th e real misalignment is large enough to prevent it. In other words, informational communication is always feasible, if there exists the opportunity to engage it.