Multi-period competitive cheap talk with completely biased experts∗

Each of n experts communicates to a principle about the privately observed quality of his own project via cheap talk, and new independently drawn projects are available each period until the principle has adopted k < n projects. Even when experts are completely biased in that they only receive a positive payoff if their own project is selected, we show that informative equilibria may exist, characterize the set of symmetric equilibria, and find the Pareto dominant equilibrium. Experts face a tradeoff between inducing acceptance now versus waiting for a better project should the game continue. When the future is more highly valued experts send more informative messages, increasing the average quality of an adopted project and resulting in a Pareto improvement, while the opposite is true when there is more competition between experts from either higher n or lower k.