On the hardness of designing public signals

Shaddin Dughmi

Games and Economic Behavior, 2019, vol. 118, issue C, 609-625

Abstract: We use computational complexity as a lens to study the design of information structures in games of incomplete information. We focus on one of the simplest instantiations of the information structure design problem: Bayesian zero-sum games, and a principal who must design a public signal maximizing the equilibrium payoff of one of the players. In this setting, we show that optimal information structure design is computationally intractable, and in some cases hard to approximate, assuming that it is hard to recover a planted clique from an Erdős–Rényi random graph. Our result suggests that there is no “simple” characterization of optimal public-channel information structures in multi-player settings.

Keywords: Signaling; Persuasion; Information structures (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:118:y:2019:i:c:p:609-625

DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2018.08.001

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