This paper examines reputation, the belief of a decision maker about types of advisors, in a two period cheap talk model where the decision maker obtains messages from two advisors. The decision maker believes that an advisor can be one of two types - an advisor who is biased towards suggesting any particular advice (bad advisor) or an advisor who has the same preferences as the decision maker (good advisor). I assume that each advisor perfectly knows the type of the other advisor, but his signal about the state of the world is imperfect. Strong reputational concern makes the good advisor sometimes tell a lie in the first period regardless of the type of the other advisor. It is shown that the presence of the other advisor does affect the message sent by an advisor. The good advisor has a greater incentive to tell a lie when he knows that the other advisor is bad rather than good. If each type of advisor considers his second period sufficiently important, it is better for the decision maker to have a single advisor.
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Paper provided by The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economic Institute, Prague in its series CERGE-EI Working Papers with number
wp314.
Find related papers by JEL classification: D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search, Learning, and Information
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