In Chapter 1, I consider strategic and costly reporting in Bayesian persuasion. After privately observing a result from an experiment he designs, a sender strategically reports the result to a receiver to influence her action. This reporting incurs a cost that depends on both the result of the experiment and the message the sender reports. Based on the unique sequential equilibrium selected by the D1 criterion in a signaling subgame with a given experiment, I show that an optimal experiment always exists. Furthermore, the optimal experiment may lead to full or partial (or no) information transmission depending mainly on the shapes of the cost function. When the cost function is not convex and truthful reporting is costly, I find that the sender may ex ante strictly prefer strategic repo...[ Read more ]

In Chapter 1, I consider strategic and costly reporting in Bayesian persuasion. After privately observing a result from an experiment he designs, a sender strategically reports the result to a receiver to influence her action. This reporting incurs a cost that depends on both the result of the experiment and the message the sender reports. Based on the unique sequential equilibrium selected by the D1 criterion in a signaling subgame with a given experiment, I show that an optimal experiment always exists. Furthermore, the optimal experiment may lead to full or partial (or no) information transmission depending mainly on the shapes of the cost function. When the cost function is not convex and truthful reporting is costly, I find that the sender may ex ante strictly prefer strategic reporting over fully committing to truthful reporting even if truthful reporting enables him to minimize the reporting cost for any realized result.

In Chapter 2, I consider communication of expertise in a disclosure game. A sender wants to persuade a receiver to take a high action. The sender has private information about how much evidence she can acquire. After the sender communicates her private expertise to the receiver through a cheap talk message, she obtains some evidence that she can choose to disclose or conceal. The receiver partially attributes any incomplete disclosure to the sender concealing unfavorable evidence and wants to take an action based on the true information. I show that ex ante, the sender never wants the receiver to consider she has the lowest expertise. Moreover, the sender’s expertise can be communicated through pure cheap talk before the disclosure game, and the expertise information can be partially transmitted in a partition equilibrium that contains finite or infinite intervals under certain conditions.