The conditional commitment abilities of mutually transparent computer agents
have been studied in previous work on commitment games and program equilibrium.
This literature has shown how these abilities can help resolve Prisoner's
Dilemmas and other failures of cooperation in complete information settings.
But inefficiencies due to private information have been neglected thus far in
this literature, despite the fact that these problems are pervasive and might
also be addressed by greater mutual transparency. In this work, we introduce a
framework for commitment games with a new kind of conditional commitment
device, which agents can use to conditionally reveal private information. We
prove a folk theorem for this setting that provides sufficient conditions for
ex post efficiency, and thus represents a model of ideal cooperation between
agents without a third-party mediator. Connecting our framework with the
literature on strategic information revelation, we explore cases where
conditional revelation can be used to achieve full cooperation while
unconditional revelation cannot. Finally, extending previous work on program
equilibrium, we develop an implementation of conditional information
revelation. We show that this implementation forms program ϵ-Bayesian
Nash equilibria corresponding to the Bayesian Nash equilibria of these
commitment games.Comment: Accepted at the Games, Agents, and Incentives Workshop at AAMAS 202