Acquiring irrelevant information as a commitment

Wataru Kitano; Shohei Yanagita

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arXiv · 2608.14173

Acquiring irrelevant information as a commitment

Wataru Kitano·Shohei Yanagita

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Abstract

We formulate the voter's strategic information acquisition to control the future self's action as a Bayesian persuasion problem. Our main result shows that acquiring information that is irrelevant to the voter's objective can be a worst-case optimal solution: it can reduce the possibility that the future self is swayed by additional information whose content is ambiguous to the current voter.

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Wataru Kitano, Shohei Yanagita. 2026-08-17. Acquiring irrelevant information as a commitment. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14173

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