A class of strategy-correlated equilibria in sender-receiver games

This paper shows that the efficiency bound for communication equilibria identified by Goltsman, Hörner, Pavlov and Squintani [15] in the leading example of the CrawfordSobel model can be obtained with strategy-correlated equilibria, thus preserving privacy vis-à-vis the mediator. More generally, all equilibrium outcomes of the -noise model of Blume, Board and Kawamura [4], including outcomes with an uncountable infinity of equilibrium actions, can be obtained via strategy-correlated equilibria of the noise-free game. The occasional mismatch between the encoding and decoding rules used by sender and receiver in a strategy-correlated equilibrium can be interpreted as uncertainty about language use. ∗I am grateful to Françoise Forges, Maria Goltsman, Maxim Ivanov, Navin Kartik and Joel Sobel for comments. I am also indebted to two anonymous referees who have helped to substantially improve the paper.