Why Consulting Two Experts?
Abstract: This paper characterizes a two-sender cheap-talk game with unidimensional state space under simultaneous disclosure which is typically more informative than the canonical two-sender cheap talk game under sequential disclosure (Krishna and Morgan, QJE, 2001) and the one-sender N*-step equilibrium result characterized in Crawford and Sobel (1982). Specifically, we extend the Crawford and Sobel (1982) game to two senders, characterizing the equilibrium strategies and profiles of messages for each sender. The receiver can credibly refuse to update his beliefs and take a default action when receiving inconsistent reports, which is always known to the senders. This permits an N*+1 partition equilibrium that typically entails more information transmission compared with the game in which only one sender is consulted. This property holds for a very broad range of biases. The paper extends the literature on unidimensional cheap talk with two senders and is a novel rejoinder to the work of Krishna and Morgan, who show that when senders act in sequence, a single sender transmits as much information as do multiple like-biased senders.
