We examine the classic "Beer-Quiche" game from Cho and Kreps (1987), and relax the assumption that the order placed by the senderis completely observable. Under the optimal degree of transparency, the receiverachieves a higher payoff than with full transparency. Partial obfuscation of the sender's choice encourages separation: committing to a less informative signal about the sender's choice affects the endogenous information generation process such that the receiver thereby secures himself more information .
How can a receiver design an information structure in order to elicit information from a sender? We study how a decision-maker can acquire more information from an agent by reducing her own ability to observe what the agent transmits. Intuitively, when the two parties' preferences are not perfectly aligned, this garbling relaxes the sender's concern that the receiver will use her information to the sender's disadvantage. We characterize the optimal information structure for the receiver. The main result is that under broad conditions, the receiver can do just as well as if she could commit to a rule mapping the sender's message to actions: information design is just as good as full commitment. Similarly, we show that these conditions guarantee that ex ante information acquisition always benefits the receiver, even though this learning might actually lower the receiver's expected payoff in the absence of garbling. We illustrate these effects in a range of economically relevant examples .
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We examine the classic "Beer-Quiche" game from Cho and Kreps (1987), and relax the assumption that the order placed by the senderis completely observable. Under the optimal degree of transparency, the receiverachieves a higher payoff than with full transparency. Partial obfuscation of the sender's choice encourages separation: committing to a less informative signal about
How can a receiver design an information structure in order to elicit information from a sender? We study how a decision-maker can acquire more information from an agent by reducing her own ability to observe what the agent transmits. Intuitively, when the two parties' preferences are not perfectly aligned, this garbling relaxes the sender's concern that the receiver will use her information to the sender's disadvantage. We characterize the optimal information structure for the receiver. The main result is that under broad conditions, the receiver can do just as well as if she could commit to a rule mapping
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choice affects the endogenous information generation process such that the receiver thereby secures himself more information
message to actions: information design is just as good as full commitment. Similarly, we show that these conditions guarantee that ex ante information acquisition always benefits the receiver, even though this learning might actually lower the receiver's expected payoff in the absence of garbling. We illustrate these effects in a range of economically relevant examples