Resisting persuasion

Elias Tsakas (), Nikolas Tsakas and Dimitrios Xefteris
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Elias Tsakas: Maastricht University

Economic Theory, 2021, vol. 72, issue 3, No 3, 723-742

Abstract: Abstract In the context of Bayesian Persuasion (Kamenica and Gentzkow in Am Econ Rev 101:2590–2615, 2011), typically, a biased Sender designs a signal to influence the binary decision of an unbiased Receiver. Can the Receiver improve her payoffs by adopting a resistance strategy, i.e., by committing into incurring (deterministic or stochastic) costs if she picks the Sender-preferred action? We argue that deterministic resistance strategies cannot improve the Receiver’s payoffs, whereas stochastic resistance strategies can increase both the informativeness of the signal and the Receiver’s payoffs. We fully characterize the optimal resistance strategy and show that it always induces a substantial increase in the Receiver’s welfare, as well as a perfectly informative signal.

Keywords: Bayesian persuasion; Resistance; Uncertainty; Money burning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D82 D83 K40 M38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Working Paper: Resisting Persuasion (2017)
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DOI: 10.1007/s00199-020-01339-0

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