Indulge me for a paragraph

There are two players, a sender and a receiver. Nature draws a state of the world , k, from a distribution K. S sees k, but wants R to believe that nature drew k+b. R takes an action that determines the welfare of both players. This is cheap talk a la Crawford and Sobel (1982). 

Cheap Talk is a blog is of cheap talk. I am the sender. I will send very noisy messages. Each message will consist of an essay. Some of them relate to economics, some are (mostly true) stories and some are simply my thoughts. 

My goal is to convince you to see the world my way in hopes that you will provide positive engagement 

Do I expect to succeed. Not really. Crawford and Sobel outline several equilibria ranging from perfect alignment to the babbling equilibrium, where the receiver ignores the sender’s messages. For my own sake, I’m setting my reference point to babbling. Failure doesn’t feel like failure when it’s expected 🙂

Who am I

I am an aspiring “’economist’”. I’m like Marie Kondo. Except, instead of asking “does this spark joy”, I ask “does this maximise utility”. I cannot predict stocks (that’s gambling). I also can’t tell you if the fed should raise interest rates (that’s macro). 

What do I do? I study “common sense”. I’m interested in questions like “how do social norms form?” or “do people treat their morality like their money?”

Outside of my main gig, I (nominally) cook, lift, sketch and write. More realistically, I spend an obscene amount of time chatting on discord and watching YouTube.

That’s enough about me.