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Persuasion with ambiguous receiver preferences

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  • Eitan Sapiro-Gheiler

    (MIT)

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Eitan Sapiro-Gheiler, 2024. "Persuasion with ambiguous receiver preferences," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 77(4), pages 1173-1218, June.
  • Handle: RePEc:spr:joecth:v:77:y:2024:i:4:d:10.1007_s00199-023-01522-z
    DOI: 10.1007/s00199-023-01522-z
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Bayesian persuasion; Maxmin utility; Mean-preserving contraction;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
    • D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness

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