Persuasion with ambiguous receiver preferences
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199_2023_Article_1522.pdf
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1.26 MB
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Adobe PDF
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00aafae1a3569482633a3548b54beef7
Author(s)
Sapiro-Gheiler, Eitan
Date Issued
September 14, 2023
Publisher
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Citation
Sapiro-Gheiler, Eitan. 2023. "Persuasion with ambiguous receiver preferences."
Version
Final published version
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.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00199-023-01522-z
