Cheap Talk with an Informed Receiver

This paper examines the effectiveness of cheap talk when the receiver is imperfectly informed. We show that the receiver's prior knowledge becomes an impediment to efficient communication in a model with the discrete state space: in general, the more the receiver is informed, the less information she can extract from the sender. In fact, when the receiver is as informed as the sender, no information can be conveyed via cheap talk for an arbitrarily small preference bias. This draws sharp contrast to the conventional setup where there is always a fully separating equilibrium as long as the preference bias is sufficiently small. We relate this result to issues that are critical for organizational design, such as the allocation of decision-making authority and the span of control.

D2P2: database of disordered protein predictions

We present the Database of Disordered Protein Prediction (D2P2), available at http://d2p2.pro (including website source code). A battery of disorder predictors and their variants, VL-XT, VSL2b, PrDOS, PV2, Espritz and IUPred, were run on all protein sequences from 1765 complete proteomes (to be updated as more genomes are completed). Integrated with these results are all of the predicted (mostly structured) SCOP domains using the SUPERFAMILY predictor. These disorder/structure annotations together enable comparison of the disorder predictors with each other and examination of the overlap between disordered predictions and SCOP domains on a large scale. D2P2 will increase our understanding of the interplay between disorder and structure, the genomic distribution of disorder, and its evolutionary history. The parsed data are made available in a unified format for download as flat files or SQL tables either by genome, by predictor, or for the complete set. An interactive website provides a graphical view of each protein annotated with the SCOP domains and disordered regions from all predictors overlaid (or shown as a consensus). There are statistics and tools for browsing and comparing genomes and their disorder within the context of their position on the tree of life. © The Author(s) 2012. Published by Oxford University Press

Can more information facilitate communication?

In this paper we analyze a cheap talk model with a partially informed receiver. In clear contrast to the previous literature, we find that there is a case where the receiver's prior knowledge enhances the amount of information conveyed via cheap talk. The point of departure is our explicit focus on the dual role of the sender's message in this context: when the receiver has imperfect private information of her own, the sender's message provides information about the true state as well as about the reliability of the receiver's private information. This feature gives rise to the asymmetric response of the receiver's action, where the receiver reacts less to the truthful message and more to the misrepresented one, which is essential in disciplining the sender to be more truthful

Cheap Talk with an Informed Receiver

ISER discussion paperJune 2009. Revised June 201

Domain-Specific Web Search with Keyword Spices

Domain-specific web search engines are effective tools for reducing the difficulty in acquiring information from the web. Existing methods for building domain-specific web search engines require human expertise or specific facilities. However, we can build a domain-specific search engine simply by adding domain specific keywords called "keyword spices" to the user's input query and forwarding it to a generalpurpose web search engine. Keyword spices can be effectively discovered from web documents using machine learning technologies. This paper will describe domain-specific web search engines that use keyword spices for locating cooking recipes, restaurants, and used cars. To fully automate the construction of domain-specific search engines, we also present trials of using web pages in an existing web directory as training examples