IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wyi/wpaper/002385.html

Pivotal Persuasion

Author

Listed:
  • Jimmy Chan

    (Department of Economics, Chinese University of Hong Kong)

  • Seher Gupta

    (Department of Economics, New York University)

  • Fei Li

    (Department of Eco- nomics, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill)

  • Yun Wang

    (Wang Yanan Institute for Stud- ies in Economics, Xiamen University)

Abstract

A sender seeks to persuade a group of heterogeneous voters to adopt an action. We analyze the sender’s information-design problem when the collective decision is made through a majority vote and voting for the action is personally costly. We show that the sender can exploit the heterogeneity in voting costs by privately communicating with the voters. Under the optimal information structure, voters with lower costs are more likely to vote for the sender’s preferred action when it is the wrong choice than those with higher costs. The sender’s preferred action is, therefore, adopted with a higher probability when private communication is allowed than when it is not. Nevertheless, the sender’s preferred action cannot be adopted with probability one if no voter, as a dictator, is willing to vote for it without being persuaded.

Suggested Citation

  • Jimmy Chan & Seher Gupta & Fei Li & Yun Wang, 2018. "Pivotal Persuasion," Working Papers 2018-11-03, Wang Yanan Institute for Studies in Economics (WISE), Xiamen University.
    • Handle: RePEc:wyi:wpaper:002385
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://econpub.xmu.edu.cn/research/repec/upload/201811031731464791.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Inés Moreno de Barreda & Gilat Levy & Ronny Razin, 2017. "Persuasion with Correlation Neglect: Media Power via Correlation of News Content," Economics Series Working Papers 836, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    3. Skreta, Vasiliki & Koessler, Frédéric, 2021. "Information Design by an Informed Designer," CEPR Discussion Papers 15709, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    4. Carl Heese & Stephan Lauermann, 2021. "Persuasion and Information Aggregation in Elections," ECONtribute Discussion Papers Series 112, University of Bonn and University of Cologne, Germany.
    5. Bruno Salcedo, 2019. "Persuading part of an audience," Papers 1903.00129, arXiv.org.
    6. Raphaela Hennigs, 2021. "Conflict prevention by Bayesian persuasion," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 23(4), pages 710-731, August.
    7. Sonin, Konstantin & Egorov, Georgy, 2019. "Persuasion on Networks," CEPR Discussion Papers 13723, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    8. Kerman, Toygar & Tenev, Anastas P., 2021. "Persuading communicating voters," Research Memorandum 003, Maastricht University, Graduate School of Business and Economics (GSBE).
    9. Kerman, Toygar & Herings, P. Jean-Jacques & Karos, Dominik, 2020. "Persuading Strategic Voters," Research Memorandum 004, Maastricht University, Graduate School of Business and Economics (GSBE).
    10. Frédéric Koessler & Vasiliki Skreta, 2023. "Informed Information Design," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 131(11), pages 3186-3232.
    11. Name-Correa, Alvaro J. & Yildirim, Huseyin, 2019. "Social pressure, transparency, and voting in committees," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 184(C).
    12. Victor Augias & Daniel M. A. Barreto, 2020. "Persuading a Wishful Thinker," Papers 2011.13846, arXiv.org, revised Nov 2023.
    13. Bardhi, Arjada & Guo, Yingni, 2018. "Modes of persuasion toward unanimous consent," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 13(3), September.
    14. Raphaela Hennigs, 2019. "Conflict Prevention by Bayesian Persuasion," Working Papers tax-mpg-rps-2019-16_1, Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wyi:wpaper:002385. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: WISE Technical Team (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.wise.xmu.edu.cn/english/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.