Full Revelation of Information in Sender-Receiver Games of Persuasion

We provide necessary and sufficient conditions on both players' preferences and information that can be certified for a Sender–Receiver game to possess a separating equilibrium, as well as sufficient conditions for every equilibrium of such a game to be separating. Accordingly, we generalize Seidmann and Winter's [D.J. Seidmann, E. Winter, Strategic information transmission with verifiable messages, Econometrica 65 (1997) 163–170] results to games with partial provability

Consulting an Expert with Potentially Conflicting Preferences.

In this paper, two modes of non-binding communication between an expert and a decision- maker are compared. They are distinguished mainly by the nature of the information transmitted by the expert. In the first one, the expert reports only his opinion (soft information) concerning the desirability of a certain action, whereas in the second one, he is consulted to provide evidence (hard information) to convince the decision-maker. The expert's ability to provide evidence increases with the precision of his information. The paper shows that requiring evidence is always beneficial to the decision-maker whereas it is bene�cial to the expert if and only if the preferences of both agents are different enough.

Consulting an Expert with Potentially Conflicting Preferences

In this paper, two modes of non-binding communication between an expert and a decision- maker are compared. They are distinguished mainly by the nature of the information transmitted by the expert. In the first one, the expert reports only his opinion (soft information) concerning the desirability of a certain action, whereas in the second one, he is consulted to provide evidence (hard information) to convince the decision-maker. The expert's ability to provide evidence increases with the precision of his information. The paper shows that requiring evidence is always beneficial to the decision-maker whereas it is bene�cial to the expert if and only if the preferences of both agents are different enough

How to consult an expert? Opinion vs Evidence

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Bias and Negligence with Freedom of Information

We analyse decision-making in the presence of Freedom of Information (FOI) rules. A decision-maker chooses whether to acquire costly information to inform his decision regarding a policy action. If information is not disclosed voluntarily a monitor may open a costly investigation, using FOI to access the information. A finding of biased decision-making or negligence in information acquisition generates a reward to the monitor and a penalty to the decision-maker. We find that strengthening FOI to reduce the cost of investigation may increase negligence without necessarily reducing bias. Moreover increasing the reward for discovering negligence can paradoxically increase negligence in equilibrium

Sequential Aggregation of Verifiable Information

We introduce the notion of verifiable information into a model of sequential debate among experts who are motivated by career concerns. We show that self-censorship may hamper the efficiency of information aggregation, as experts withhold evidence contradicting the conventional wisdom. In this case, silence is telling and undermines the prevailing view over time if this view is incorrect. As a result, withholding arguments about the correct state of the world is only a temporary phenomenon, and the probability of the correct state of the world being revealed always converges to one as the group of experts becomes large. For small groups, a simple mechanism the principal can use to improve decisionmaking is to appoint a devil’s advocate.experts, committees, career concerns, verifiable information, information aggregation

The role of verifiability and privacy in the strategic provision of performance feedback: Theory and experimental evidence

We theoretically and experimentally analyze the role of verifiability and privacy in strategic performance feedback using a “one principal-two agent” context with real effort. We confirm the theoretical prediction that information transmission occurs only in verifiable feedback mechanisms and private-verifiable feedback is the most informative mechanism. Yet, subjects also exhibit some behavior that cannot be explained by our baseline model, such as telling the truth even when this will definitely hurt them, interpreting “no feedback” more optimistically than they should, and being influenced by feedback given to the other agent. We show that a model with individual-specific lying costs and naive agents can account for some, but not all, of these findings. We conclude that although agents do take into account the principal's strategic behavior to form beliefs in a Bayesian fashion, they are overly optimistic and interpret positive feedback to the other agent more pessimistically than they should

Dynamic Strategic Information Transmission

This paper studies strategic information transmission in a dynamic environment where, each period, a privately informed expert sends a message and a decision maker takes an action. Our main result is that, in contrast to a static environment, full information revelation is possible. The gradual revelation of information and the eventual full revelation is supported by the dynamic rewards and punishments. The construction of a fully revealing equilibrium relies on two key features. The first feature is that the expert is incentivized, via appropriate actions, to join separable groups in which she initially pools with far-away types, then later reveals her type. The second feature is the use of trigger strategies. The decision maker is incentivized by the reward of further information revelation if he chooses the separation-inducing actions, and the threat of a stop in information release if he does not. Our equilibrium is non-monotonic. With monotonic partition equilibria, full revelation is impossible.Asymmetric information, Cheap talk, Dynamic strategic communication, Full information revelation