Persuading skeptics and reaffirming believers

Ricardo Alonso and Odilon Câmara

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: In a world where rational individuals may hold different prior beliefs, a sender can influence the behavior of a receiver by controlling the informativeness of a signal. We characterize the set of distributions of posterior beliefs that can be induced by a signal, and provide necessary and sufficient conditions for a sender to benefit from information control. We examine a class of models with no value of information control under common priors, and show that a sender generically benefits from information control under heterogeneous priors. We extend our analysis to cases where the receiver’s prior is unknown to the sender.

Keywords: persuasion; information control; heterogeneous priors (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D83 M31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2014-05-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:58680

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