Disclosure to a Psychological Audience

Abstract

We study how a benevolent expert should disclose information to an agent with psychological concerns. We first provide a method to compute an optimal information policy for many psychological traits. The method suggests, for instance, that an agent suffering from temptation à la Gul and Pesendorfer (2001) should not know what he is missing, thereby explaining observed biases as an optimal reaction to costly self-control. We also show that simply recommending actions is optimal when the agent is intrinsically averse to information but has instrumental uses for it. This result, which circumvents the failure of the Revelation Principle in psychological environments, simplifies disclosure and informs the debate regarding mandated disclosure. (JEL D11, D82, D83, D91)