Beneficial mediated communication in cheap talk

This paper investigates mediated communication between an informed sender and an uninformed receiver with conflicting preferences in the framework of Crawford and Sobel (1982). It provides a simple condition for mediation to be beneficial, that is, to give the receiver a higher ex-ante payoff than the uninformed decision. This condition in turn allows us to identify scenarios in which mediation is beneficial while all cheap-talk equilibria are uninformative. Our condition extends the conditions for beneficial mediation with a binary type space (Mitusch and Strausz, 2005) and mediation via a biased mediator (Ambrus et al., 2013). Finally, we show the connection between the identified condition and related conditions in other conflict resolution schemes: delegation (Alonso and Matouschek, 2008) and arbitration (Kovac and Mylovanov, 2009). (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.