Acquiring irrelevant information as a commitment

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.

14 pages, no figures; typos corrected