Information Transmission and Preference Similarity

This paper examines sets of Nash equilibria in sender-receiver games that are stable against replacement by alternative Nash equilibria. Such stable sets exist. In {\em partial common interest games} they contain only informative equilibria. The stability requirement sharpens currently available predictions for such games by (1) weakening the partial common interest condition, (2) ruling out strictly dominated actions, (3) reflecting the informativeness of the sender's strategy in the receiver's reply, and (4) by ruling out pooling actions. This approach is then used as a step toward unifying the study of partial common interest games and of Crawford and Sobel's parametric model of preference similarity.