We study a model of cheap talk with one substantive assumption: The sender's preferences are state independent. Our main observation is that such a sender gains credibility by degrading self‐serving information. Using this observation, we examine the sender's benefits from communication, assess the value of commitment, and explicitly solve for sender‐optimal equilibria in three examples. A key result is a geometric characterization of the value of cheap talk, described by the quasi concave envelope of the sender's value function.

A principal incentivizes a team of agents to work by privately offering them bonuses contingent on team success. We study the principal’s optimal incentive scheme that implements work as a unique equilibrium. This scheme leverages rank uncertainty to address strategic uncertainty. Each agent is informed only of a ranking distribution and his own bonus, the latter making work dominant provided that higher-rank agents work. If agents are symmetric, their bonuses are identical. Thus, discrimination is strictly suboptimal, in sharp contrast with the case of public contracts (Winter 2004). We characterize how agents’ ranking and compensation vary with asymmetric effort costs. (JEL D23, D62, D81, D82, D86)

We can often predict the behavior of those closest to us more accurately than that of complete strangers, yet we routinely engage in strategic situations with both: our social network impacts our strategic knowledge. Peer‐confirming equilibrium describes the behavioral consequences of this intuition in a noncooperative game. We augment a game with a network to represent strategic information: if two players are linked in the network, they have correct conjectures about each others' strategies. In peer‐confirming equilibrium, there is common belief that players (i) behave rationally and (ii) correctly anticipate neighbors' play. In simultaneous‐move games, adding links to the network always restricts the set of outcomes. In dynamic games, the outcome set may vary non‐monotonically with the network because the actions of well‐connected players help poorly‐connected players coordinate. This solution concept provides a useful language for studying public good provision, highlights a new channel through which central individuals facilitate coordination, and delineates possible sources of miscoordination in protests and coups.

A sender commissions a study to persuade a receiver but influences the report with some probability. We show that increasing this probability can benefit the receiver and can lead to a discontinuous drop in the sender’s payoffs. To derive our results, we geometrically characterize the sender’s highest equilibrium payoff, which is based on the concavification of a capped value function.

A buyer procures a good owned by a group of sellers whose heterogeneous cost of trade is private information. The buyer must either buy the whole good or nothing, and sellers share the transfer in proportion to their share of the good. We characterize the optimal mechanism: trade occurs if and only if the buyer’s benefit of trade exceeds a weighted average of sellers’ virtual costs. These weights are endogenous, with sellers who are ex ante less inclined to trade receiving higher weight. This mechanism always outperforms posted-price mechanisms. An extension characterizes the entire Pareto frontier. (JEL D44, D63, D82, Q15, Q24)