Lying in persuasion

Zhaotian Luo and Arturas Rozenas

Games and Economic Behavior, 2025, vol. 152, issue C, 93-112

Abstract: We study how the speaker acquires information when they can misrepresent it in communication with the audience. In a binary action setup, we characterize the speaker's optimal information design and the parametric conditions under which the acquired information is disclosed truthfully. When the players' preferences are sufficiently misaligned, the speaker uses the same information structure as when they could not lie, and they communicate that information truthfully. By contrast, when the players' preferences are sufficiently aligned, the speaker chooses a different information structure that generates more persuasive beliefs and induces lying in equilibrium. The speaker's loss of welfare due to the lack of commitment power is more pronounced when lies are harder to detect.

Keywords: Persuasion; Information acquisition; Lying; Misinformation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D02 D82 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899825625000582
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:93-112

DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2025.04.006

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 ().