Persuading an audience: Testing information design in the laboratory

Andreas G. B. Ziegler

No 23-048/I, Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute

Abstract: Governments, central banks, and private organizations frequently face the challenge of convincing their audience to take a specific action. One key choice is whether to send a public message that can coordinate the audience’s actions or to rely instead on private messages that may differ across audience members and thereby miscoordinate actions. This paper uses a laboratory experiment to test whether public or private messages are more persuasive and how this depends on the audience’s strategic environment. In the experiment, public signals are most persuasive. The results match the theoretical prediction that public persuasion works best when the receivers’ strategic environment features strategic complements. However, contrary to theory, public signals are equally persuasive as private ones under strategic substitutes. Senders respond to this pattern by engaging more frequently in public communication, especially when the receivers’ environment features strategic complements.

Keywords: information design; Bayesian persuasion; laboratory experiment; Bayes correlated equilibria; obedience; recommendations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D82 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-08-23
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-gth
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.tinbergen.nl/23048.pdf (application/pdf)

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:tin:wpaper:20230048

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tinbergen Office +31 (0)10-4088900 ().