Communication policy with public uncertainty

Abstract

This paper analyses how to design a communication policy in a setting with both incomplete information and uncertainty about the future. In the model developed, both agents and the information authority have only noisy knowledge of the state of the world and the degree of uncertainty of the authority is unknown to the agents. The information authority chooses how much information to provide to private agents and how precise, or disperse, such information will be. Agents faces costs on information acquisition and choose how much of it to obtain. In the model developed in this paper, the presence of incomplete information does not alter the equilibrium choices, as a separating equilibrium can be achieved. In all cases analysed, the information authority would prefer to offer signals with the lowest dispersion possible