Oxford Events, the new replacement for OxTalks, will launch on 16th March. The two-week OxTalks freeze period starts on Monday 2nd March. During this time, there will be no facility to publish or edit events. The existing OxTalks site will remain available to view during this period. Once Oxford Events launches, you will need a Halo login to submit events. Full details are available on the Staff Gateway.
A decision maker (DM), who will take a binary decision, cares about his reputation for being “good,” i.e., wanting to accord his action choice with public evidence, as opposed to being “bad,” i.e., having a fixed partisan agenda regardless of the evidence. While the decision is taken after evidence is realized, the DM has the option to take a “stand” beforehand, i.e., to communicate his intentions via a cheap-talk message. A wide range of equilibria exist and are characterized by how much the good DM reveals about his standards at this initial communication stage. The most informative of these is ex-ante signaling, which sees the DM effectively commit to a contingent plan as a function of the realized evidence. Our main theorem shows that, across all equilibria, ex-ante signaling minimizes the probability that the DM follows his partisan agenda.
