Abstract:
In reality, how information is transmitted to its recipients is as important as its content. In this paper, we introduce families of (indirect) information structures — meeting schemes and delegated hierarchies — that capture the horizontal and vertical dimensions of real-world transmission. We characterize the outcomes that they implement in general (finite) games and show that they are optimal in binary-action environments with strategic complementarities. Our main application illustrates how the optimal meeting scheme and the optimal delegated hierarchy change with the objective function in a classical regime-change game.