Article

Long information design

Frédéric Koessler, Marie Laclau, Jérôme Renault, and Tristan Tomala

Abstract

We analyze information design games between two designers with opposite preferences and a single agent. Before the agent makes a decision, designers repeatedly disclose public information about persistent state parameters. Disclosure continues until no designer wishes to reveal further information. We consider environments with general constraints on feasible information disclosure poli- cies. Our main results characterize equilibrium payoffs and strategies of this long information design game and compare them with the equilibrium outcomes of games where designers move only at a single predetermined period. When information disclosure policies are unconstrained, we show that at equilibrium in the long game, information is revealed right away in a single period; otherwise, the number of periods in which information is disclosed might be unbounded. As an application, we study a competition in product demonstration and show that more information is revealed if each designer could disclose information at a pre-determined period. The format that provides the buyer with most information is the sequential game where the last mover is the ex-ante favorite seller.

Keywords

Bayesian persuasion; concavification; convexification; information; design; Mertens–Zamir solution; product demonstration, splitting games; statis-; tical experiments; stochastic games.;

JEL codes

  • C72: Noncooperative Games
  • D82: Asymmetric and Private Information • Mechanism Design

Replaces

Frédéric Koessler, Marie Laclau, Jérôme Renault, and Tristan Tomala, Long information design, TSE Working Paper, n. 22-1341, June 2022.

Reference

Frédéric Koessler, Marie Laclau, Jérôme Renault, and Tristan Tomala, Long information design, Theoretical Economics, vol. 17, n. 2, 2022, p. 883–927.

Published in

Theoretical Economics, vol. 17, n. 2, 2022, p. 883–927