Effective Persuasion

Abstract

Do elementary statistics or equilibrium theory deliver any insight regarding how we should argue in debates? We provide an answer in a model in which each discussant wants to convince the audience that a specific state holds. If the discussants' payoffs in the audience's posterior are concave above and convex below the prior and exhibit loss aversion, then the leading discussant should give precedence to the weaker argument, and the follower should respond to a weak argument weakly and to a strong argument strongly. Such characterizations are also obtained for the case of choosing between independent and correlated arguments.

Single-Issue Campaigns and Multidimensional Politics

“…Several papers study strategic revelation of hard evidence in debates. InChen and Olszewski (2014), discussants have a choice between strong and weak arguments, and show that committing to a weak argument may sometimes be desirable. In an earlier paper, Austen-Smith (1990) models debates in legislatures as cheap talk, and argues that they a¤ect outcomes only throught a¤ecting agenda-setting, but not voting.6 There is a large literature on pandering to voters by partisan politicians as well as obscuring one's positions, both on campaign trail and in o¢ ce, starting withShepsle (1972), who argues that in the presence of voters with local risk aversion, equilibria with imperfect revelation of political positions are possible Alesina and Cukierman (1990).…”

On the optimality of diverse expert panels in persuasion games

“…The perceived benefit of such a panel is that the competing experts may undo each other's attempts to conceal unfavorable information. The literature on persuasion games has also primarily focused on the settings where the preferences of the informed parties are opposed in some sense (notable examples include Milgrom and Roberts, 1986;Lipman and Seppi, 1995;Shin, 1994Shin, , 1998Glazer and Rubinstein, 2001;and Chen and Olszewski, 2014).…”