Cheap talk with multiple senders and receivers: Information transmission in ethnic conflicts

Consider a society with two ethnic groups in which the state of the world is uncertain. Without new information, ethnic conflict ensues. If there is an informed agent who knows the state of the world and can communicate via private cheap talk messages, can she prevent conflict? We find that while a peace-loving informed agent is unable to prevent conflict as she cannot communicate credibly with either ethnicity, an aggressive informed agent can communicate information to her own ethnicity, and therefore prevent conflict with positive probability. Furthermore, we show that when there are two aggressive informed agents (one in each ethnicity), then both ethnic groups receive information, but, under some conditions, there is an informative equilibrium in the environment with one informed agent which generates a higher probability of peace than any informative equilibrium with two informed agents.