Hidden Profiles and Persuasion Cascades in Group Decision-Making

We provide a model to explain hidden profiles, a series of persuasion cascades where players choose not to share their private information with the others and the group therefore fails. In our model, rational players will jointly select a decision. Attributes decide which decision is optimal, but each player privately and imperfectly knows these attributes. Hence, before decision-making, the players meet and sequentially talk. A player benevolently talks based on his limited information. But under communication constraints, the benevolent talk may cause the next player to infer that a suboptimal decision is most likely to be optimal. The next player repeats the previous talk because he is afraid that his private information may misguide the group. In this way, the players persuade one another by withholding private information.