An uninformed sender designs a mechanism that discloses information about her type to a privately informed receiver, who then decides whether to act. I impose a single-crossing assumption, so that the receiver with a higher type is more willing to act. Using a linear programming approach, I...

A sender chooses ex ante how her information will be disclosed to a privately informed receiver who then takes one of two actions. The sender wishes to maximize the probability that the receiver takes the desired action. The sender faces an ex ante quantity-quality tradeoff: sending positive...

We study persuasion mechanisms in linear environments. A privately informed receiver chooses between two actions. A sender designs a persuasion mechanism that can condition the information disclosed to the receiver on the receiver's report about his type. We establish the equivalence of...

There are two common ways for a principal to influence the decision making of an agent. One is to manipulate the agent's information (persuasion problem). Another is to limit the agent's decisions (delegation problem). We show that, under general assumptions, these two problems are equivalent;...

We consider a Bayesian persuasion problem where a sender's utility depends only on the expected state. We provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the optimality of upper censorship that pools the states above a cutoff and reveals the states below the cutoff. This condition is equivalent...

We consider a standard persuasion problem in which the receiver’s action and the state of the world are both one-dimensional. Fully characterizing optimal signals when utilities are non-linear is a daunting task. Instead, we develop a general approach to understanding a key qualitative...

A sender designs a signal about the state of the world to persuade a receiver. Under standard assumptions, an optimal signal censors states on one side of a cutoff and reveals all other states. This result holds in continuous and discrete environments with general and monotone partitional...