Scott Saas

Signal Disclosure in Information Design (Job Market Paper)

This paper studies the information design environment where the designer is restricted to using messages that players can publicly and verifiably disclose. I employ a belief-based approach to characterizing the designer's optimal payoff among disclosure-proof outcomes, utilizing the methods of Mathevet et al. (2020). Any outcome can be induced by sending messages specifying a player's full beliefs and a menu of contingent action recommendations. I provide a class of games which I call leader-follower games for which the designer can do no better than public information when disclosure is introduced. Complementarities between players that are beneficial to the designer in the usual environment can backfire once signal disclosure is allowed.

Disclosure-Proof Correlated Equilibria

This paper explores which correlated equilibrium outcomes are robust to players having the option to publicly and verifiably disclose their private information before playing the game. I focus on outcomes that are disclosure-proof: those that can be induced such that no player is incentivized to disclose their signal. Since signals in this environment do not carry payoff-relevant information, disclosing only limits the ability to coordinate agents off-path. I show that an outcome is disclosure-proof if and only if it satisfies obedience and certain interim participation constraints. Each player must expect to earn more after observing any of their signals than they would in the worst correlated equilibria outcome where they play independently of the other players. For two-player games, this is equivalent to the payoff of their worst Nash outcome. If disclosure-proofness restricts the set of feasible outcomes, then so does the possibility of active disclosure.

Revealing Biases in Repeated Cheap Talk

Can repeated communication help reveal agents' private preferences? I examine a class of continuous state cheap talk games where the receiver is uncertain about the bias of the sender. Only one of the two sender types can meaningfully communicate with the receiver; the other will only induce the highest possible action. I study the multi-period version of this game, where the state changes each period but the bias of the sender stays constant. This allows the receiver to learn more about the sender's bias over time. I show that for sufficiently impatient senders, reputation concerns lead to better communication in each period, and the probability that the receiver knows the sender's type converges to one as the number of periods goes to infinity. I provide examples showing that even moderately patient senders may not follow certain intuitions about revelation.

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