Order of Commitments in Bayesian Persuasion with Partial-informed Senders

Abstract

The commitment power of senders distinguishes Bayesian persuasion problems from other games with (strategic) communication. Persuasion games with multiple senders have largely studied simultaneous commitment and signalling settings. However, many real-world instances with multiple senders have sequential signalling. In such contexts, commitments can also be made sequentially, and then the order of commitment by the senders -the sender signalling last committing first or last -could significantly impact the equilibrium payoffs and strategies. For a two-sender persuasion game where the senders are partially aware of the state of the world, we find necessary and sufficient conditions to determine when different commitment orders yield different payoff profiles. In particular, for the two-sender setting, we show that different payoff profiles arise if two properties hold: 1) the two senders are willing to collaborate in persuading the receiver in some state(s); and 2) the sender signalling second can carry out a credible threat when committing first such that the other sender's room to design signals gets constrained.Manuscript submitted for review to the 23nd ACM Conference on Economics & Computation (EC'22).