This article makes a start in characterizing the second-best solution to a smooth, symmetric partnership problem. It derives a more tractable formulation of the problem using a modified version of the condition in Legros and Matthews (1993). Then it uses this formulation to show that the...

In this paper we modify the `cheap-talk' model of Crawford and Sobel 1982 by taking the state space to correspond to a circle (instead of a line). It is shown that in such a setup the relationship between the `bias' (i.e., the parameter capturing the divergence of interests between sender and...