Gaussian cheap talk game with quadratic cost functions: When herding between strategic senders is a virtue

We consider a Gaussian cheap talk game with quadratic cost functions. The cost function of the receiver is equal to the estimation error variance, however, the cost function of each senders contains an extra term which is captured by its private information. Following the cheap talk literature, we model this problem as a game with asymmetric information. We start by the single sender case in which the receiver also has access to a noisy but honest side information in addition to the message transmitted by a strategic sender. We generalize this setup to multiple sender case. For the multiple sender case, we observe that if the senders are not herding (i.e., copying each other policies), the quality of the receiver's estimation degrades rapidly as the number of senders increases.