The (No) Value of Commitment

Nathan Hancart

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arXiv · 2510.07994

The (No) Value of Commitment

Nathan Hancart

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Abstract

I provide a sufficient condition under which a principal does not benefit from committing to a mechanism in economic models represented by a maximisation problem under constraints. These problems include mechanism design, principal-agent models or sender-receiver games. In principal-agent problems, this condition holds if the agent has a finite strategy space and the principal's value function is continuous in the mechanism.

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Nathan Hancart. 2025-10-09. The (No) Value of Commitment. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07994

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