Econometrica: May, 2014, Volume 82, Issue 3

Certifiable Pre‐Play Communication: Full Disclosure

https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA11070
p. 1093-1131

Jeanne Hagenbach, Frédéric Koessler, Eduardo Perez‐Richet

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.

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