Private Languages

Abstract: Strategic communication often relies on anchors observed by the sender but not by the receiver. An analyst may report against a proprietary valuation model, an auditor against an internal score, a manager against an accounting estimate, or an institution against its own standard. I study a sender-receiver game in which reports are costly to move away from such privately observed anchors. Anchor heterogeneity changes the geometry of communication. Rather than relying on partitions, privately anchored reporting generates continuous variation in messages because different senders find different reports costly to make. This mechanism can improve information transmission, but it can also pull reports toward noisy private anchors. I show that (i) small positive reporting costs can make communication approach full revelation, even though zero costs return the model to cheap talk, (ii) uninformative anchors can transmit information through strategic distortions. Anchored reports and cheap-talk messages can coexist as endogenous hard and soft information, but cheap-talk alone is preferred by all parties under sufficiently low misalignment, explaining why organizations may rely exclusively on informal channels.