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An axiomatic model of persuasion. (English) Zbl 1514.91029

Summary: A sender ranks information structures knowing that a receiver processes the information before choosing an action affecting them both. The sender and receiver may differ in their utility functions and/or prior beliefs, yielding a model of dynamic inconsistency when they represent the same individual at two points in time. I take as primitive (i) a collection of preference orderings over all information structures, indexed by menus of acts (the sender’s ex ante preferences for information), and (ii) a collection of correspondences over menus of acts, indexed by signals (the receiver’s signal-contingent choice(s) from menus). I provide axiomatic representation theorems characterizing the sender as a sophisticated planner and the receiver as a Bayesian information processor, and show that all parameters can be uniquely identified from the sender’s preferences for information. I also establish a series of results characterizing common priors, common utility functions, and intuitive measures of disagreement for these parameters – all in terms of the sender’s preferences for information.

MSC:

91A28 Signaling and communication in game theory
91A27 Games with incomplete information, Bayesian games
Full Text: DOI

References:

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