Persuasion Through Selective Disclosure: Implications for Marketing, Campaigning, and Privacy Regulation

Florian Hoffmann, Roman Inderst and Marco Ottaviani

No 16901, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: This paper characterizes equilibrium persuasion through selective disclosure based on the personal information that senders acquire about the preferences and orientations of receivers, with applications to strategic marketing and campaigning. We derive positive and normative implications depending on: the extent of competition among senders, whether receivers are wary of senders collecting personalized data, and whether firms are able to personalize prices. Privacy laws requiring senders to obtain consent to acquire information are beneficial when there is little or asymmetric competition among senders, when receivers are unwary, and when firms caprice discriminate. Otherwise, policy intervention has unintended negative welfare consequences.

Keywords: Selective disclosure; Hypertargeting; Limited attention; Privacy regulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D83 M31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP16901 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Persuasion Through Selective Disclosure: Implications for Marketing, Campaigning, and Privacy Regulation (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:16901

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP16901

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().