A More Informed Sender Benefits the Receiver When the Sender Has Transparent Motives

A sender with state-independent preferences (i.e., transparent motives) privately observes a signal about the state of the world before sending a message to a receiver, who subsequently takes an action. Regardless of whether the receiver can mediate–and commit to a garbling of the sender’s message–or delegate–commit to a stochastic decision rule as a function of the message–and understanding the statement ``the receiver is better off as a result of an improvement of the sender’s information’’ to mean that her maximal and minimal equilibrium payoffs (weakly) increase as the sender’s signal improves (in a Blackwell sense), we find that if the sender is more informed, the receiver is better off.