We experimentally study how individuals read strategically transmitted information when they have preferences over what they will learn. Subjects play disclosure games in which Receivers should interpret messages skeptically. We vary whether the state that Senders communicate about is ego-relevant or neutral for Receivers, and whether skeptical beliefs are aligned or not with what Receivers prefer believing. Compared to neutral settings, skepticism is significantly lower when it is self-threatening, and not enhanced when it is self-serving. These results shed light on a new channel that individuals can use to protect their beliefs in communication situations: they exercise skepticism in a motivated way, that is, in a way that depends on the desirability of the conclusions that skeptical inferences lead to. We propose two behavioural models that can generate motivated skepticism. In one model, the Receiver freely manipulates his beliefs after having made skeptical inferences. In the other, the Receiver reasons about evidence in steps and the depth of his reasoning is motivated.

We consider situations in which every agent would like to take an action that is coordinated with those of others, as well as close to a common state of nature, with the ideal proximity to that state varying across agents. Before this coordination game is played, agents decide to whom they reveal their private information about the state. The information transmission occurring in the cheap-talk communication stage is characterized by a strategic communication network whose links represent truthful information transmission. In equilibrium, whether communication takes place between two agents depends not only on the conflict of interest between these agents, but also on the number and preferences of the other agents with whom they communicate. In particular, communication to a large group of recipients may be feasible even though communication to a small subset of that group may not be. We show that agents who are more central in terms of preference tend to communicate more and to have a greater impact on decisions.

This article asks when communication with certifiable information leads to complete information revelation. We consider Bayesian games augmented by a pre-play communication phase in which announcements are made publicly. We first characterize the augmented games in which there exists a fully revealing sequential equilibrium with extremal beliefs (i.e., any deviation is attributed to a single type of the deviator). Next, we define a class of games for which existence of a fully revealing equilibrium is equivalent to a richness property of the evidence structure. This characterization enables us to provide different sets of sufficient conditions for full information disclosure that encompass and extend all known results in the literature, and are easily applicable. We use these conditions to obtain new insights in games with strategic complementarities, voting with deliberation, and persuasion games with multidimensional types.