Derandomization of Persuasion Mechanisms

Abstract

We consider a setting where one sender can communicate with several privately informed receivers through a persuasion mechanism before the receivers play a game. We show that for any potentially randomized persuasion mechanism, under certain conditions, there is an effectively equivalent deterministic persuasion mechanism, and these two mechanisms have the same set of equilibria. We exhibit the usefulness of our result in an information disclosure application, where our technique helps to derive the optimal persuasion mechanism. Overall, this paper provides a rationale for the fact that persuasion mechanisms are often deterministic in practice.