In the Crawford-Sobel (uniform, quadratic utility) cheap-talk model we allow for mediation in which the informed agent reports one possible element of a partition to a mediator (a communication device) and then the mediator suggests an action to the uninformed decision-maker according to the probability distribution of the device. We compare the unmediated N-partition equilibrium of the Crawford-Sobel model with a mediated equilibrium involving exactly N elements to report and N actions to choose from. We show that such a mediated equilibrium cannot improve upon the unmediated N-partition equilibrium when the preference divergence parameter is small.
