Many forms of social interaction in market economies, from job interviews to press conferences, are a type of interrogation. In these “interrogation games,” the interrogator seeks accurate and replete information from a subject who aims to both appear forthcoming while also concealing sensitive material. In this manuscript, I define the interrogation game and develop a structural account of how the game should unfold, rooted in Goffman’s theory of the interaction order, to produce a desired outcome for the subject. I argue two constructs deemed universally essential to successful conversation–interpersonal alignment and conversational flow–instead produce dissonant interaction when undertaken by the wrong party. I apply my theory to study the conversations of sell-side analysts and executives in over 50,000 quarterly earnings calls (QECs) and predict analysts’ future stock recommendations for the firm. I measure alignment and flow by projecting each utterance in the conversation to a high dimensional space using word embeddings and validate the measures against hand-annotated data. Consistent with my theory, I find analysts upgrade the stock when executives exhibit deference by aligning with analyst questions and letting analysts control the flow of conversation. In contrast to theories of topical control, I find that analysts are more likely to downgrade the firm when analysts align with executives and when executives drive the conversation. I discuss the implications of these results for the literatures on QECs and firm valuation, computational conversation analysis, and the micro-sociology of strategic interaction.