Essays on Communication and Information Disclosure
Open Access
- Author:
- Lee, Gunhaeng
- Graduate Program:
- Economics
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 25, 2018
- Committee Members:
- Kalyan Chatterjee, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Kalyan Chatterjee, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
James Jordan, Committee Member
Ron Siegel, Committee Member
Steven J Huddart, Outside Member - Keywords:
- information disclosure
cheap talk
communication game
verifiable information - Abstract:
- Communication is a process of sending and receiving information among people and it plays a significant role in a value creation process in organizations as it facilitates the spread of information. In an organization where agents have different preference and information, communication oftentimes incorporates non-trivial strategic aspects of agents. The research provides theoretical contributions to the study of communication and information disclosure among those agents with different objectives. The first essay models communications in platforms. Platforms not only mediate matches but work as information gatekeepers. When users who have private taste participate in a matching platform to find their partner, the platform asks them to provide matching-relevant information and, subsequently, aggregates and distributes the collected data back to each user to facilitate effective coordination of matches. How can a platform design information flow by which users form matches in a manner that is desirable to that platform? In this paper, I characterize a two-way communication approach that employs both verifiable and non-verifiable messages, and delineate the conditions under which a platform can (or cannot) achieve a socially optimal matching outcome using this communication protocol. In the platform that achieves such an outcome, users fully reveal their private taste, but the platform returns personalized and only filtered information back to each user in the form of a “Recommendation.” I identify three key factors that enable such communication. I also demonstrate that a stable match can arise under certain conditions when the platform does not intervene in the communication between users, and users communicate with each other using verifiable messages. I then study the optimal customized pricing schedules of the platform. When the platform can fully customize its prices to each user, I show that full extraction of user surplus is possible if messages are verifiable and communications take place only through the platform. Lastly, as an application, I also study a two-way communication protocol with non-verifiable messages and demonstrate that communication strictly improves efficiency in any circumstances. In the second essay, I consider a sender-receiver game in a continuous time framework, in which the biased sender, who has private information, can send a cheap-talk message anytime to the receiver. The receiver also can choose to stop and make a decision anytime. Time is assumed to be costly. In the study, I characterize a particular class of equilibrium which explains “suspicion grows from silence” phenomenon. In equilibrium, the sender gradually reveals his type, and the receiver learns the type over time. However, I show that a full revelation from all types of the sender is not possible because of the cost of time. In essay three, I consider a sender-receiver game where the private information of the sender evolves over time following a two-state Markov process. To influence the receiver’s decision, the sender sends cheap-talk messages every period. The receiver has an option to wait, and the game ends as soon as the receiver makes a non-waiting decision. I demonstrate that unless the sender’s preference is extreme, in the sense that the sender’s utility is type independent, truthtelling equilibrium exists if players are patient enough and utility function is separable. In case of extreme preference of the sender, the study shows that there still exists an equilibrium in which informative messages are sent in every period with strictly positive probabilities.