We study the role of commitment in communication and its interactions with rules, which determine whether information is verifiable. Our framework nests models of cheap talk, information disclosure, and Bayesian persuasion. It predicts that commitment has opposite effects on information transmission under the two alternative rules. We leverage these contrasting forces to experimentally establish that subjects react to commitment in line with the main qualitative implications of the theory. Quantitatively, not all subjects behave as predicted. We show that a form of commitment blindness leads some senders to overcommunicate when information is verifiable and undercommunicate when it is not. This generates an unpredicted gap in information transmission across the two rules, suggesting a novel role for verifiable information in practice.

Information provision in games influences behavior by affecting agents’ beliefs about the state as well as their higher-order beliefs. We first characterize the extent to which a designer can manipulate agents’ beliefs by disclosing information. We then describe the structure of optimal belief distributions, including a concave-envelope representation that subsumes the single-agent result of Kamenica and Gentzkow. This result holds under various solution concepts and outcome selection rules. Finally, we use our approach to compute an optimal information structure in an investment game under adversarial equilibrium selection.

Abstract We conduct an experimental analysis of selective disclosure in communication. In the model, an informed sender aims to influence a receiver by disclosing verifiable evidence that is selected from a larger pool of available evidence. Our experimental design leverages this model’s rich comparative statics, allowing us to systematically quantify the effects of selection relative to concealment. Our findings confirm the key qualitative predictions of the theory, suggesting that selection, rather than concealment, is often the dominant distortion in communication. We also identify deviations from the theory: Some senders are “deception averse” and overcommunicate relative to predictions; receivers respond too optimistically to both concealed and selected evidence, with errors of similar magnitude. Yet selection generates greater overall distortion in receiver behavior because it is far more prevalent than concealment.