Persuasion with Strategic Reporting

This paper introduces strategic reporting to a Bayesian persuasion problem in which a sender publicly designs an experiment and after privately observing an experiment result, she reports a message with some cost to influence a receiver's action. The cost depends on both results and messages. First, for each experiment choice, there exists a unique sequential equilibrium selected by the D1 criterion, based on which, I establish the existence of the optimal experiment and its characterization. Then I derive respective sufficient conditions for full and partial (or no) information transmission. Lastly, given the same cost structure, though full commitment to truthful reporting enables the sender to report the cost-minimized message for any realized result, I still identify the condition under which strategic reporting is better than full commitment for the sender ex ante