Indirect Persuasion

Rahul Deb, Mallesh M. Pai and Maher Said

Journal of Political Economy, 2026, vol. 134, issue 4, 1210 - 1244

Abstract: We provide an organizational economics foundation for commitment to information structures in persuasion. An uninformed principal faces a joint screening-and-persuasion problem: she wants to influence a receiver’s belief about a payoff-relevant state using information elicited from a privately informed agent. The agent’s messages are publicly observed, so the principal cannot commit to a garbling of private communications. We show that commitment only to an employment contract with the agent permits the principal to implement the optimal unconstrained intermediation scheme. We apply our result to a brokerage contracting with sell-side analysts, where private communication is constrained by conflict-of-interest regulations, showing that public investment rating schemes can sidestep these regulations.

Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/739332 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/739332 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

Related works:
Working Paper: Indirect Persuasion (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucp:jpolec:doi:10.1086/739332

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Political Economy from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().