Information design: A unified perspective

Given a game with uncertain payoffs, information design analyzes the extent to which the provision of information alone can influence the behavior of the players. Information design has a literal interpretation, under which there is a real information designer who can commit to the choice of the best information structure (from her perspective) for a set of participants in a game. We emphasize a metaphorical interpretation, under which the information design problem is used by the analyst to characterize play in the game under many different information structures. We provide an introduction to the basic issues and insights of a rapidly growing literature in information design. We show how the literal and metaphorical interpretations of information design unify a large body of existing work, including that on communication in games (Myerson 1991), Bayesian persuasion (Kamenica and Gentzkow 2011), and some of our own recent work on robust predictions in games of incomplete information.