Expert advice for amateurs

• This paper analyzes strategic information transmission between a perfectly informed expert and a partially informed decision maker.
• The decision maker can privately tell whether the state is “high” or “low”.
• The expert strategically responds by providing less informative advice.
• As a result, for some types of decision maker, being informed makes them worse off.
• Examples show, however, that the ex-ante opportunity to access information is beneficial when the expert has moderate bias.

A biased, perfectly informed expert advises a partially and privately informed decision maker using cheap-talk message. The decision maker can tell whether the state is “high” or “low” relative to a private threshold that divides the unit-interval state space into two subintervals. The decision maker's response to the expert's advice becomes less sensitive under the former's own information. In response, the expert provides advice that is considered more biased, relative to the case when decision maker is uninformed. For some types of decision maker, this negative, strategic effect of their own information outweighs its direct, positive effect—being informed makes them worse off. Examples show, however, that evaluated before the realization of her type, the opportunity to access information is always beneficial to the decision maker when the expert has moderate bias.