How Expert Are the Experts? A Model for Expertise Cultivation

We study a cheap talk model where the Expert and the Receiver have different prior beliefs regarding the true state. Before communicating with the Receiver, the Expert can cultivate his expertise at a cost in order to improve the accuracy of his observations. We consider the situations where the Receiver may and may not observe the Expert's expertise. We show that when the Receiver can observe the expertise level, the Expert with more extreme biases can indeed put forth more efforts in his expertise. In this situation, both the Expert and the Receiver are better off than when the expertise is unobservable.