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arXiv · 2512.16850

Best Garbling is No Garbling: Persuasion in Real Time

Can Urgun·Mark Whitmeyer
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Abstract

We study continuous-time persuasion where a sender controls both how informative a signal is over time and when to stop providing information to a receiver. There is an exogenous signal process, which the sender both garbles and stops, delaying the receiver's decision at a convex, increasing cost of time. We show that, although both instruments are available, under natural regularity conditions, full transparency is always optimal: the sender keeps the signal fully informative and persuades solely by choosing when to stop.

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Can Urgun, Mark Whitmeyer. 2025-12-18. Best Garbling is No Garbling: Persuasion in Real Time. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.16850

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