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The paper develops a theory of costly communication in which the sender’s and receiver’s motivations and abilities endogenously determine the communication mode and the transfer of knowledge. Communication is modeled as a problem of moral hazard in teams, in which the sender and receiver select persuasion and message elaboration efforts. The model is shown to provide a rich set of insights concerning (i) the impact of incentive alignment on communication strategies, (ii) the relative influence and the complementarity/substitutability between issue‐relevant communication and cues (information that relates to the credibility of the sender rather than to the issue at stake), and (iii) the path dependency of communication.
Dewatripont et al. (Mon,) studied this question.