Linguistic Indirectness in Public Cheap-Talk Games

We study linguistic indirectness when speakers attend to social ties. Social ties are modeled by a graph, and conferences are the sets of nodes that hear a message. Conference worth is a distance polynomial on the graph; allocations are given by the Myerson value of the conference-restricted worth, which yields the bargaining-power components for each participant. Aggregating these components gives an effective bias that, via a Partition-Threshold rule, pins down the number of equilibrium message partitions in a cheap talk game. Results: (i) among trees, stars maximize worth, leading to weakly fewer equilibrium partitions; (ii) on stars, we derive closed-form effective biases, with a witness-hub marginal effect of adding leaves changing sign at $\delta^{\ast}=0.6$; (iii) for two stars joined by one link, two-star (hub-hub) vs big-star (hub-leaf) precision flips at 8/15 for the same number of nodes; private leaf-leaf conferences are most informative.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Unknown venue

• Publication date

  2025-11-11

• Fields of study

  Linguistics, Economics

• Identifiers
  arXiv 2511.07961
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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