Francesco Giovannoni (University of Bristol)

This week's seminar will be given by Francesco Giovannoni from the University of Bristol.  Please note this seminar was previously advertised as taking place on 2 March 2016.

Title: Communication with Language Barriers

Abstract:

As defined in Blume and Board (2013), "language barriers" exist when there is no common knowledge on players having the full communication ability. But are "language barriers" really barriers? Or equivalently, do "language barriers" always reduce welfare? We provide negative answers for this question.  Specifically, we show how "language barriers" can be overcome in any common-interest games and in certain non-common-interest games. In particular, "language barriers" can (weakly) Pareto improve players' welfare in the canonical Crawford and Sobel (1982) cheap-talk game, if a suitable communication protocol is adopted. Finally, we provide a linear ranking regarding welfare on mediated communication in Goltsman et al. (2009), communication under "language barriers", and noisy talk in Blume et al. (2007). In particular, we show that "language barriers" sometimes make all players strictly better off than any generalized noisy talk, which includes the Crawford and Sobel cheap-talk game (without noise) as a special case.