Bayesian Persuasion without Commitment

Abstract

We introduce a model of persuasion in which a sender without any commitment power privately gathers information about an unknown state of the world and then chooses what to verifiably disclose to a receiver. The receiver does not know how many experiments the sender is able to run, and may therefore be uncertain as to whether the sender disclosed all of her information. Despite this challenge, we show that, under general conditions, the sender is able to achieve the same payoff as in the full-commitment Bayesian persuasion case.