This EC tutorial is aimed at researchers who would like to learn about recent advances in the field of strategic communication and how they relate to the information design toolbox. The main target audience is a theoretical researcher (from CS, OR, economics, or related) who is comfortable with game theoretic models. 

The tutorial will overview the role of commitment in strategic communication, focusing on sender-receiver games. In the first part, we review the two extreme cases of full commitment (Bayesian persuasion) and no commitment (cheap talk). Our focus is on the applicability of the belief-based approach to these models. In the second part, we review various ways of generating intermediate commitment in the sender-receiver interaction, including mediation, informed information design, stochastic commitment, manipulable correlation, long cheap talk, lying costs, and others. We give a birds-eye view of these different models, providing a deeper dive into settings that lend themselves to belief-based analysis. 

Lecture 1:  Communication with and without commitment [Doron Ravid, Slides, Video].

Lecture 2:  Communication with partial commitment [Elliot Lipnowski, Slides, Video].

References

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