Reputational cheap talk: influentialness and welfare
Journal: ArXiv.org
Year: 2025

A sender communicates private information about a hidden state to a receiver who seeks to match his action to that state. The sender strives to appear informed at the receiver's expense. I characterize informative equilibria under a broad class of signal structures and show that, when they exist, they are essentially unique. I show that informative equilibria can be noninfluential, in which case the receiver does not benefit from communication and relies only on prior information. My main result