Polarizing persuasion

Axel Anderson and Nikoloz Pkhakadze

Games and Economic Behavior, 2025, vol. 152, issue C, 181-198

Abstract: We introduce an equilibrium model of polarizing communication between a sender and two receivers. The sender's payoff is a function of the receivers' beliefs on a binary payoff relevant variable. All agents share a common prior about this variable. But we assume disagreement about a second binary variable, which enters no utility functions. We characterize the joint distribution of receiver posterior beliefs on the payoff relevant variable that can be implemented. An immediate consequence of this characterization is that the sender's payoff is non-decreasing in the prior disagreement between the two receivers. We measure polarization as the sender's expectation of the absolute difference between the receivers' posterior beliefs on the payoff relevant variable, and solve for the maximum polarization across all message services. Given extreme prior disagreement between the receivers, we solve for the optimal message service when the sender has monotone payoffs that are bi-concave or bi-convex.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899825625000594
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:eee:gamebe:v:152:y:2025:i:c:p:181-198

DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2025.04.007

Access Statistics for this article

Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai

More articles in Games and Economic Behavior from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().