When does strategic information disclosure lead to perfect consumer information?∗

A firm chooses a price and how much information to disclose about its product to a consumer whose tastes are unknown to the firm. Full disclosure of product information is always part of a sequential equilibrium when types are independent. In that case, a necessary and sufficient condition on equilibrium payoffs is that they are at least as high as those under full revelation for all product types. We provide a sufficient, and to some extent, necessary condition for full disclosure of product information to be the unique equilibrium outcome whatever the priors (independent or not). That condition encompasses the condition that all consumers agree on the ranking of product types’ quality as in a standard persuasion game but it also allows for different consumers to have different rankings of the potential product types.