Persuasion and Matching: Optimal Productive Transport
Anton Kolotilin,
Roberto Corrao and
Alexander Wolitzky
Journal of Political Economy, 2025, vol. 133, issue 4, 1334 - 1381
Abstract:
We consider general Bayesian persuasion problems where the receiver’s utility is single-peaked in a one-dimensional action. We show that a signal that pools at most two states in each realization is always optimal and that such “pairwise” signals are the only solutions under a nonsingularity condition on utilities. Our core results provide conditions under which the induced receiver action is single-dipped or single-peaked on each set of nested signal realizations. We also provide conditions for the optimality of either full disclosure or negative assortative disclosure, where all signal realizations are nested. Methodologically, our results rely on novel duality and complementary slackness theorems. Our analysis extends to a general problem of assigning one-dimensional inputs to productive units, which we call “optimal productive transport.” This problem covers additional applications including matching with peer effects (assigning workers to firms, students to schools, or residents to neighborhoods), robust option pricing (assigning future asset prices to price distributions), and partisan gerrymandering (assigning voters to districts).
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/734095 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/734095 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.
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:ucp:jpolec:doi:10.1086/734095
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in Journal of Political Economy from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().