We study informed persuasion, whereby a privately informed designer without ex ante commitment power chooses disclosure mechanisms to influence agents’ actions. We characterize the subset of Bayes-correlated equilibria yielding every designer type a payoff higher than what they could get from any disclosure mechanism with credible beliefs. This set of interim-optimal mechanisms is nonempty and tractable, and all its elements are perfect Bayesian equilibrium mechanisms of the informed-designer game. Interim-optimal mechanisms are characterized via belief-based approaches in pure persuasion settings. We identify single- and multiagent interactive environments in which ex ante–optimal mechanisms are interim optimal.

We consider situations in which every agent would like to take an action that is coordinated with those of others, as well as close to a common state of nature, with the ideal proximity to that state varying across agents. Before this coordination game is played, agents decide to whom they reveal their private information about the state. The information transmission occurring in the cheap-talk communication stage is characterized by a strategic communication network whose links represent truthful information transmission. In equilibrium, whether communication takes place between two agents depends not only on the conflict of interest between these agents, but also on the number and preferences of the other agents with whom they communicate. In particular, communication to a large group of recipients may be feasible even though communication to a small subset of that group may not be. We show that agents who are more central in terms of preference tend to communicate more and to have a greater impact on decisions.

This article asks when communication with certifiable information leads to complete information revelation. We consider Bayesian games augmented by a pre-play communication phase in which announcements are made publicly. We first characterize the augmented games in which there exists a fully revealing sequential equilibrium with extremal beliefs (i.e., any deviation is attributed to a single type of the deviator). Next, we define a class of games for which existence of a fully revealing equilibrium is equivalent to a richness property of the evidence structure. This characterization enables us to provide different sets of sufficient conditions for full information disclosure that encompass and extend all known results in the literature, and are easily applicable. We use these conditions to obtain new insights in games with strategic complementarities, voting with deliberation, and persuasion games with multidimensional types.