Different people use language in different ways. We capture this by making language competence—the set of messages an agent can use and understand—private information. Our primary focus is on common-interest games. Communication generally remains possible; it may be severely impaired even with common knowledge that language competence is adequate; and, indeterminacy of meaning, the confounding of payoff-relevant information with information about language competence, is optimal.

We experimentally study decentralized organizational learning. Our objective is to understand how learning members of an organization cope with the confounding effects of the simultaneous learning of others. We test the predictions of a stylized, rational agent model of organizational learning that provides sharp predictions as to how learning members of an organization might cope with the simultaneous learning of others as a function of fundamental variables, e.g., firm size and the discount factor. While the problem of learning while others are learning is quite difficult, we find support for the comparative static predictions of the model's unique symmetric equilibrium.