Rarely, if ever, do parties contemplating a joint project commit resources without engaging in non-binding discussions on who does what. Here we argue that such noncommittal discussions may be essential to complete a joint project. We make this point by identifying an interesting class of...

The paper analyzes a communication game between a decision-maker and a reputationally concerned expert drawn from a population of informed and uninformed experts. It departs from the literature [e.g. (Ottaviani and Sorensen(2006), Scharfstein and Stein (1990)] by considering the possibility that...