Evidence Acquisition and Voluntary Disclosure: Denis Shishkin (UCSD)

Abstract: A sender seeks hard evidence to persuade a receiver to take a certain action. There is uncertainty about whether the sender obtains evidence. If she does, she can choose to disclose it or pretend to not have obtained it. When the probability of obtaining information is low, we show that the optimal evidence structure is a binary certification: all it reveals is whether the (continuous) state of the world is above or below a certain threshold. Moreover, the set of low states that are concealed is non-monotone in the probability of obtaining evidence. When binary structures are optimal, higher uncertainty leads to less pooling at the bottom because the sender uses binary certification to commit to disclose evidence more often.

A draft version of this paper is available here.

Contact Deniz Kattwinkel at d.kattwinkel@ucl.ac.uk for the seminar link.