Going Public or Going Private? Cheap-Talk Game with Interacting Decision-Makers ∗

This paper examines the effect of interactions between heterogeneous decisionmakers on an agent’s information revelation incentives. We analyze a cheap-talk game between an informed agent and two uninformed decision-makers who coordinate their actions. We compare public communication with private communication. In the latter environment, we find that the agent responds to the decision-makers’ coordination by providing less precise information. For any partition equilibrium with the same number of partition elements, the agent faces much tighter incentive compatibility constraints under private than under public communication. Moreover, the agent’s incentive to reveal information changes non-monotonically in response to the decision-makers’ desire to coordinate. The pattern of the change depends on the decision-makers’ relative heterogeneous biases.