Ethnic conflicts with informed agents: a cheap talk game with multiple audiences

Abstract

We consider a society on the brink of ethnic conflict due to misinformation. An ‘informed agent’ is a player who has information which may prevent conflict. Can the informed agent achieve peace by communicating privately with the players? The issue is that if the informed agent is known to favour her own ethnicity, she is unable to communicate credibly with the other ethnicity. Despite this, we show that peace can be achieved in equilibrium. Our paper contributes to the literature on cheap talk games with multiple audiences with the novel addition of private signals along with payoff externalities.