The Limits of Limited Commitment

We study limited strategic leadership. A collection of subsets covering the leader's action space determines her commitment opportunities. We characterize the outcomes resulting from all possible commitment structures of this kind. If the commitment structure is an interval partition, then the leader's payoff is bounded by her Stackelberg and Cournot payoffs. However, under more general commitment structures the leader may obtain a payoff that is less than her minimum Cournot payoff. We apply our results to study information design problems in leader-follower games where a mediator communicates information about the leader's action to the follower.