Communication with Language Barriers

We consider a general communication model with language barriers, and study whether language barriers harm welfare in communication. Contrary to the negative result in Blume and Board (2013), we provide two positive results. First, the negative effect of any language barriers can be completely eliminated, if we introduce a new communication protocol called N-dimensional communication. Second, even if we stick to the classical 1-dimensional communication (as in Crawford and Sobel (1982)), for any payoff primitive, there exists some language barriers whose maximimal equilibrium welfare dominates any cheap-talk equilibrium under no language barriers. We thank.... †Department of Economics, University of Bristol, [email protected] ‡Department of Economics, University of Bristol, [email protected]