THREE ESSAYS ON INFORMATION TRANSMISSION IN ASYMMETRIC INFORMATION GAMES

This dissertation consists of three chapters where we study information transmission in various environments.The first chapter analyzes the effect of the presence of an uninformed sender on the information transmission between an informed sender and the receiver. The sender is uninformed with a positive probability and it is not verifiable whether she is informed or not. In almost all equilibria, the uninformed sender pools with a subset of types of the informed sender. We show that there exists an equilibrium in which the informed sender's cheap talk message conveys more precise information and the informed sender is better off by the presence of the uninformed sender.In the second chapter, a buyer is uncertain of information on product qualities. We introduce a variable that generates social value of information, which is buyer's action such as the usage and maintenance of a product after purchase. If the buyer is concerned about his action, the seller has more incentive to reveal product information. Furthermore, more information is revealed as the variance of the quality is larger or as the average quality is lower. In this model, the certification cost is increasing in the sense that a better certificate is more costly. Then, there are multiple equilibria and the least level of revelation is ex ante Pareto optimal.In the third chapter, we study firms' voluntary disclosure in an oligopoly market for differentiated products in which firms are allowed to advertise a rival's product as well as their own product. We show that full information is revealed by a high quality firm's comparative advertisement, where the advertisement on the rival's product is negative. Moreover, full revelation is the unique equilibrium outcome. The results imply that by allowing for negative advertisement on rivals' products, a society can increase consumers' welfare without mandatory disclosure laws