Verifiable Disclosure

We develop a unified treatment of a broad class of truthful disclosure games. Such games have, at most, one equilibrium that is reasonable given a commonly used signaling refinement. We provide a simple algorithm to construct the unique equilibrium strategy and beliefs, and identify necessary and sufficient conditions for existence. This approach applies to multidimensional verifiable disclosure games with arbitrary costs or information endowments. We prove the following conjecture: a disclosure regulation that commits the sender to providing more precise information reduces welfare in a competitive market. We also perform comparative statics with respect to frictions that prevent unraveling and show, in an application, that the reasonable equilibrium involves sanitation