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LIT-1313: Information Design: A Unified Perspective

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Properties5
StatusActive — read 2026-10-21 (NOTE-1034) in full, from Cowles Foundation Discussion Paper 2075R3 (March 2018, the accepted manuscript); worth reading as the general frame for designing what others know: what an omniscient designer can bring about is exactly the Bayes correlated equilibria, a polytope given by linear obedience constraints (THEORY-844), read literally as a designer's reach and metaphorically as a bound over all information structures, with prior information shrinking it and an incentive order that extends Blackwell's (THEORY-853). Read it knowing that it is a survey whose central results are proved in the authors' other papers, that its players are Bayesian with a common prior, and that its two-firm example with strategic substitutes states an optimal rule that is infeasible under the parameters it assumes (the copy read; the JEL text was not compared).
Version2
Tagsgame-theory
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1034 — Bergemann and Morris — Information design, a unified perspective
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-844 — A designer who commits to how players are informed, and may condition on the state and on their prior information but cannot choose their actions, can bring about exactly the Bayes correlated equilibria, the joint distributions of states and actions in which no player told his recommended action wants to deviate, a polytope cut out by linear constraints; with one uninformed receiver who would lose 1 by investing in the bad state and gain x < 1 in the good, the most investment attainable is certain investment in the good state and investment with probability x in the bad, THEORY-853 — Giving players more information shrinks what an information designer can make them do: for one player, being more informative in Blackwell's sense, being a garbling's source and leaving a smaller set of Bayes correlated equilibria in every decision problem are the same order; for many players the incentive order is individual sufficiency, which neither implies nor is implied by sufficiency of the players' joint information

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Bergemann, D. & Morris, S. (2019). Information Design: A Unified Perspective. Journal of Economic Literature 57(1): 44–95. doi:10.1257/jel.20181489. Earlier: Cowles Foundation discussion paper, SSRN 2017 (doi:10.2139/ssrn.2919675).

Read 2026-10-21 in full, in NOTE-1034, from the accepted manuscript (Cowles Foundation Discussion Paper 2075R3). The summary was checked against the reading.

Why this is here

A25: it “extends the information-design viewpoint beyond one sender and receiver to strategic interaction among multiple agents. Particularly relevant to reflexive control and institutionally mediated persuasion.” A26 §4 used it for control over what is known. The general frame for the record’s held information-design work, LIT-1021 (Kamenica & Gentzkow) and THEORY-404. Bears on CLAIM-404.

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