Persuasion with ambiguous receiver preferences

Eitan Sapiro-Gheiler ()
Additional contact information
Eitan Sapiro-Gheiler: MIT

Economic Theory, 2024, vol. 77, issue 4, No 9, 1173-1218

Abstract: Abstract I describe a Bayesian persuasion problem where Receiver has a private type representing a cutoff for choosing Sender’s preferred action, and Sender has maxmin preferences over all Receiver type distributions with known mean and bounds. This problem can be represented as a zero-sum game where Sender chooses a distribution of posterior mean beliefs that is a mean-preserving contraction of the prior over states, and an adversarial Nature chooses a Receiver type distribution with the known mean; the player with the higher realization from their chosen distribution wins. I formalize the connection between maxmin persuasion and similar games used to model political spending, all-pay auctions, and competitive persuasion. In both a standard binary-state setting and a new continuous-state setting, Sender optimally linearizes the prior distribution over states to create a distribution of posterior means that is uniform on a known interval with an atom at the lower bound of its support.

Keywords: Bayesian persuasion; Maxmin utility; Mean-preserving contraction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D81 D82 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00199-023-01522-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:joecth:v:77:y:2024:i:4:d:10.1007_s00199-023-01522-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... eory/journal/199/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00199-023-01522-z

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Theory is currently edited by Nichoals Yanneils

More articles in Economic Theory from Springer, Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().