In Crawford and Sobel (1982) (CS), a sender (S) uses cheap talk to persuade a receiver (R) to select an action as profitable to S as possible. This paper shows that the presence of an outside option Ð that is, allowing R to avoid taking any action, yielding state-independent reservation...

Consider an uninformed decision maker (DM) who communicates with a partially informed speaker (S) through cheap talk. DM can choose a project to implement or the outside option of no project. We show that if the agentsÕ ex-ante rankings over projects do not coincide, then this conflict of...