Optimal Persuasion With An Application To Media Censorship

A sender designs a signal about a state to persuade a receiver. Under standard assumptions, an optimal signal reveals the states below a cutoff and pools the states above the cutoff. This result holds in continuous and discrete environments with general and monotone partitional signals. We provide monotone comparative statics results on the informativeness of the optimal signal. We apply our results to the problem of media censorship by a government.