Lucas Barros

Research

 The Limits of Information Acquisition in Cheap Talk

Can designing one’s own information substitute for commitment in communication? This paper studies a sender who commits to an information acquisition policy but communicates with a receiver through cheap talk. The main result shows that, for finite action spaces, acquisition design attains the Bayesian persuasion payoff for every prior if and only if classical cheap talk, with no acquisition design, already does. That is, whenever commitment to communication is essential for persuasion, designing the sender’s information alone is insufficient. The result clarifies the role of commitment in information design and identifies a limitation of endogenous information acquisition.