Mediated Disclosure

Abstract

We introduce a mediator to a communication setting with verifiable (hard) evidence and characterize precisely when mediation can induce every obedient outcome--every type-contingent distribution of actions that the receiver is willing to follow--including the outcome that delivers the sender's commitment (Bayesian persuasion) payoff. For both type-independent and general preferences, it is necessary for each type to have a message he alone can send. This is also sufficient for type-independent preferences, whereas the general case also requires a particular alignment of the types'utilities. We also rank evidence structures by the distributions of actions conditional on the sender's type that they can induce at (mediated) equilibrium, through garbling conditions analogous to Blackwell's comparison of experiments.