Competition in costly talk

This paper studies a communication game between an uninformed decision maker and two perfectly informed senders with conflicting interests. Senders can misreport information at a cost that increases with the size of the misrepresentation. The main result concerns the characterization of equilibria with desirable properties: they always exist, are essentially unique, and are robust. Information transmission is partial in these equilibria, and persuasion occurs on the equilibrium path. By contrast, equilibria where the decision maker obtains her complete-information payoff are not robust, and hinge on beliefs with potentially undesirable properties.