Rational Debate and One-Dimensional Conflict*
研究大规模人群中关于多维集体决策的重复沟通，发现当偏好一致但信念分歧时，公开沟通会使分歧在极限下消失或变为一维，解释了许多国家政治冲突的几何特征。
This paper studies repeated communication regarding a multidimensional collective decision in a large population. When preferences coincide but beliefs about the consequences of the various decisions diverge, it is shown, under some specific assumptions, that public communication causes the disagreement between beliefs either to vanish or to become one-dimensional at the limit. Multidimensional disagreement indeed allows for many directions of communication, including some that are orthogonal to the conflict, along which agents can communicate credibly. The possible convergence toward a one-dimensional conflict where no further communication takes place may be related to the empirically observed geometry ofthe political conflict in many countries.