Selected Facts

A sender must provide facts to persuade a receiver to accept or reject a proposal. Sender-optimal strategies in this constrained information design problem correspond to maximal-weight matchings on a bipartite graph that incorporates novel fact-selection constraints. Receiver payoffs are independent of the sender's cardinal preferences, although these preferences determine the actual decisions. We show exactly when the sender can induce his ideal decisions. When the receiver can first specify a set of admissible facts, she may (not) like to eliminate the sender's freedom to select facts, and she may be able to get her own ideal decisions in some situations.