Pivotal persuasion
Jimmy Chan,
Seher Gupta,
Fei Li () and
Yun Wang
Journal of Economic Theory, 2019, vol. 180, issue C, 178-202
Abstract:
A sender seeks to persuade a group of heterogeneous voters to adopt an action. We analyze the sender's information-design problem when the collective decision is made through a majority vote and voting for the action is personally costly. We show that the sender can exploit the heterogeneity in voting costs by privately communicating with the voters. Under the optimal information structure, voters with lower costs are more likely to vote for the sender's preferred action when it is the wrong choice than those with higher costs. The sender's preferred action is therefore adopted with a higher probability when private communication is allowed than when it is not. Nevertheless, the sender's preferred action cannot be adopted with probability one if no voter, as a dictator, is willing to vote for it without being persuaded.
Keywords: Bayesian persuasion; Information design; Private persuasion; Strategic voting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022053119300018
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:jetheo:v:180:y:2019:i:c:p:178-202
DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2018.12.008
Access Statistics for this article
Journal of Economic Theory is currently edited by A. Lizzeri and K. Shell
More articles in Journal of Economic Theory from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().