Best Garbling is No Garbling: Persuasion in Real Time

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that in continuous-time persuasion, optimal strategies involve full transparency with no garbling, relying solely on timing to influence the receiver's decision.

Contribution

It reveals that despite having tools to garble information or delay decisions, optimal persuasion in continuous time involves full transparency and timing control only.

Findings

Optimal persuasion schemes are fully transparent.

Garbling is unnecessary for optimal persuasion.

Timing control suffices for effective influence.

Abstract

We study continuous-time persuasion where a sender controls both how informative a signal is over time and when to stop providing information to a receiver. Given an exogenous signal process, the sender can both garble the evolving signal path and delay the receiver's decision at a convex, increasing cost of time. We show that, although both instruments are available, any optimal persuasion scheme is fully transparent: the sender keeps the signal fully informative and persuades solely by choosing when to stop.