How to replace public communication with private one

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Azacis, Helmuts; Vida, Peter
• 署名单位: Corvinus University Budapest; CY Cergy Paris Universite; Corvinus University Budapest
• 刊物名称: GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0899-8256
• DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2026.07.008
• 发表日期: 2026
• 关键词: talk

摘要

A sender wants to make a public announcement to three receivers but she cannot. The Byzantine agreement communication protocol (Lamport et al., 1982) prescribes that the sender instead sends the same private message to the receivers who in turn forward to each other the message they have received from the sender. Let the receivers consider the (bitwise) majority of their received messages as a pseudo public message of the sender. We show that this protocol, besides being 1resilient, substitutes public communication in a very strong sense: every player can consistently believe (Kreps and Wilson, 1982), no matter what messages they have sent or received, that all the receivers hold the same pseudo public message which coincides with the (bitwise) majority of the messages sent by the sender. It follows that the set of sequential equilibrium outcomes of any game (with at least four players) is weakly larger with private communication than with public communication.