When choosing experts, such as lawyers or physicians, people often rely on how those experts present themselves in online professional profiles. Research on self-presentation has largely focused on how it signals the presenter’s personal attributes, such as warmth and competence. I argue that self-presentation also signals how interaction with the presenter is likely to unfold. I introduce agency-granting, defined as the extent to which experts position those seeking their expertise as having meaningful influence over how interactions unfold. Across three studies in professional service contexts, I examine how agency-granting shapes clients’ evaluations of experts. In a field study of 45,132 client reviews of 2,701 lawyers, I trained and validated machine-learning models to measure agency-granting separately in lawyers' profiles and in clients' reviews. Lawyers who used more agency-granting language in their profiles received higher client ratings, and this relationship was evident in how clients described their experiences: profiles higher in agency-granting were followed by reviews in which clients described having had more influence, which in turn predicted higher ratings. The association between agency-granting and client ratings was stronger for lawyers who had attended elite law schools. Two preregistered experiments help explain these patterns: agency-granting led prospective clients to expect greater self-determination in the interaction, which in turn led them to evaluate experts more favorably. This pathway was stronger for higher-status experts, with whom clients otherwise expected to have less influence. These findings extend theories of self-presentation by showing that audiences use self-presentational cues not only as a portrait of the presenter, but also as a preview of their own influence in future interactions.
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