This paper studies the optimal refund mechanism when an uninformed buyer can privately acquire information about his valuation over time. In principle, a refund mechanism can specify the odds that the seller requires the product returned while issuing a (partial) refund, which we call stochastic...

An uninformed sender chooses a publicly observable experiment and sends a message to a receiver after privately learning the experimental outcome. To design the optimal experiment, the sender faces a tension between acquiring more information and alleviating the conflict of interest. In the...

An uninformed sender publicly commits to an informative experiment about an uncertain state, privately observes its outcome, and sends a cheap-talk message to a receiver. We provide an algorithm valid for arbitrary state-dependent preferences that will determine the sender's optimal experiment,...