Persuading an audience: Testing information design in the laboratory

This paper examines how to persuade an audience of multiple receivers. Using two laboratory experiments, I investigate whether coordinating the audience’s actions using public signals or relying on private messages to miscoordinate actions is more effective in persuasion, how this depends on the audience’s strategic environment, and which channel information designers actually choose. The results match the theoretical prediction that public persuasion works best when the receivers’ environment features strategic complements. Informational incentives as captured in obedience constraint organize receivers’ responses. However, contrary to theory, public signals are as persuasive as private ones under strategic substitutes. When designing information, senders respond to this pattern by engaging more frequently in public communication, especially when the receivers’ environment features strategic complements, but persuade too aggressively.