A recent information design literature focuses on the value to buyers of acquiring strategically-designed information about their valuation to induce a monopolist to set lower prices. We highlight the value of commitments to not acquire information if excessively high prices are offered, thereby...

In the past decade, we have seen a certain convergence between politics and marketing, in sometimes unexpected ways. Political campaigns now routinely use marketing tools to persuade voters. Brands, on the other hand, are engaging with increasing likelihood with explicitly-political movements of...

We study the role of re-election concerns in incumbent parties' incentives to shape the information that reaches voters. In a probabilistic voting model, candidates representing two groups of voters compete for office. In equilibrium, the candidate representing the majority wins with a...

In a symmetric information voting model, an individual (politician) can influence voters’ choices by strategically designing a policy experiment (public signal). We characterize the politician’s optimal experiment. With a non-unanimous voting rule, she exploits voters’ heterogeneity by...

In a world where rational individuals may hold different prior beliefs, a sender can influence the behavior of a receiver by controlling the informativeness of a signal. We characterize the set of distributions of posterior beliefs that can be induced by a signal, and provide necessary and...

In a world where rational individuals may hold different prior beliefs, a sender can influence the behavior of a receiver by controlling the informativeness of a signal. We characterize the set of distributions of posterior beliefs that can be induced by a signal, and provide necessary and...

In a symmetric information voting model, an individual (information controller) can influence voters’ choices by designing the information content of a public signal. We characterize the controller’s optimal signal. With a non-unanimous voting rule, she exploits voters’ heterogeneity by...