Revealed Delegation and Persuasion

To delegate future choices, planners can influence doers in various ways. In the intrapersonal case, a planner can motivate her future self by commitments, promises, deadlines etc. In the interpersonal case, doers can be selected and/or persuaded to change their beliefs. Even if delegations and persuasions are not observed directly, they can be still revealed through other choice primitives. We obtain this identification from planners' preferences over menus in a consumption space Z. All possible delegations are derived as an endogenous class of doers' rankings of Z, and can be further refined by expected utility when Z consists of lotteries or uncertain prospects. The latter case can be interpreted in terms of persuasions that affect the doer’s beliefs without changing her risk attitude.In this interpretation, the set of possible beliefs is identified uniquely. A further refinement of this model captures a planner who knows objective probabilities and can use them in persuasion. Finally, we discuss how delegations can be revealed through choices in menus rather than among menus.