Job Market Paper
When Is Mediated Communication Possible?
with Anna Merotto
We study when players can truthfully share private information through a mediator. Our analysis focuses on symmetric linear-quadratic games with strategic complements and independent private values. We characterize when mediated communication is informative, meaning that it can induce an outcome different from the unique Bayes-Nash outcome without communication. A sharp dichotomy emerges. When types that prefer higher own actions benefit less from higher opponent actions, informative communication is impossible regardless of the type distribution. By contrast, when those types benefit more from higher opponent actions, informative communication is possible if and only if the relevant extreme type lies sufficiently far from the mean. In a linear-demand Bertrand oligopoly, private costs rule out informative communication, whereas it may arise under private demand. Finally, informative communication weakly benefits every type, but whenever information sharing can raise aggregate welfare, the maximum aggregate payoff under communication is strictly below the maximum over Bayes correlated equilibria.
Working Papers
The Bounds of Mediated Communication
with Roberto Corrao
Revise and Resubmit, Econometrica; Extended Abstract in the Proceedings of EC’23
We study sender-receiver games with transparent motives, where an uninformed, sender-aligned mediator commits to a communication mechanism but cannot verify the sender's report. We compare mediated communication with cheap talk and Bayesian persuasion. A belief-value distribution is implementable by mediation exactly when it satisfies Bayes plausibility, receiver obedience, and zero covariance between posterior beliefs and sender values. This formulation separates the roles of commitment and verifiability. We show that mediation attains the persuasion value only when cheap talk also does; thus, whenever persuasion strictly outperforms cheap talk, unverifiable reports create a strict loss. We characterize when mediation strictly improves on cheap talk: the sender's value must exhibit countervailing effects along some direction in belief space. In finite-action, binary-state environments, this characterization yields a tractable description of optimal mediation. Applications cover platforms, lobbying, acceptance games, and a reinterpretation of the model as matching with externalities, where we study the efficiency-fairness tradeoff.
Bayesian Persuasion with Selective Disclosure
with Drew Fudenberg and Harry Pei
Revise and Resubmit, Theoretical Economics; Extended Abstract in the Proceedings of EC’26
A sender first publicly commits to an experiment and then can privately run additional experiments and selectively disclose their outcomes to a receiver. The sender has private information about the maximal number of additional experiments they can perform (i.e., their type). We show that the sender cannot attain their commitment payoff in any equilibrium if (i) the receiver is sufficiently uncertain about their type and (ii) the sender could benefit from selective disclosure after conducting their full-commitment optimal experiment. Otherwise, there can be equilibria where the sender obtains their commitment payoff.
Flexible Demand Manipulation
with Andrew Koh
Extended Abstract in the Proceedings of EC’26
We develop a simple framework to analyze how targeted persuasive advertising shapes market power and welfare. A designer flexibly manipulates the demand curve by influencing individual valuations at a cost. A monopolist prices against this manipulated demand curve. We fully characterize the form of optimal advertising plans under ex ante and ex post welfare measures. Flexibility per se is powerful, and can substantially harm or benefit consumers vis-a-vis uniform advertising. We discuss implications for regulation, intermediation, and the joint design of manipulation and information.
Research in Progress
Discriminatory Mediated Communication
with Roberto Corrao and Chanjoo Lee