OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
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This paper studies costly information acquisition and transmission. An expert communicates with a decision-maker about a state of nature by sending a cheap-talk message. In ecient equilibria, the expert generally reveals all acquired information to the decision-maker. I show the existence of ecient equilibria under general conditions. For the class of posterior separable cost structures, I derive properties of ecient experiments. Under posterior-mean preferences, any cheap-talk problem is solved by a convex combination of two bi-pooling policies. The best bi-pooling policies are characterized for the uniform-quadratic case. Contrary to existing cheap-talk models, monotone partitions are not always optimal.
