Persuasion and dynamic communication

Abstract

A speaker attempts to persuade a listener to accept a request by presenting evidence. A persuasion rule specifies what evidence is persuasive. This paper compares static and dynamic rules. We present a single linear program (i) whose solution corresponds to the listener's optimal dynamic rule and (ii) whose solution with additional integer constraints corresponds to the optimal static rule. We present a condition-foresight-under which the optimal persuasion problem reduces to the classical maximum flow problem. This has various qualitative consequences, including the coincidence of optimal dynamic and static persuasion rules, elimination of the need for randomization, and symmetry of optimal static rules. . I am grateful to Rakesh Vohra for suggesting the relation of the persuasion problem to the set cover problem. I thank Bart Lipman and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments. Shihui Ma, Nyalleng Moorosi, and Benjamin Segal provided valuable research assistance. I thank Kemal Badur for helping to construct the figures for this paper. A grant-in-aid and single semester leave from the University of Minnesota are gratefully acknowledged. All errors are mine.

Price discrimination through communication

“…The novelty of this paper is that segmentation is endogenous. 3 The third stream is models of persuasion (Milgrom and Roberts 1986, Shin 1994, Lipman and Seppi 1995, Glazer and Rubinstein 2004, 2006, Sher 2011, 2014. These models deal with situations in which a speaker attempts to persuade a listener to take some action.…”

“…The cost of error at an accept states is v L , because if the seller offers a high price when the buyer is of a low type, he loses a potential payoff of v L . The cost of error at a reject state is v H − v L , because if the seller offers a low price when the seller is of a high type, he loses the additional increment v H − v L that he could 37 As explored by Sher (2014), the optimal mechanism is not necessarily a persuasion rule in the above sense. In general, the listener could do better with one round of back-and-forth cheap talk communication between the speaker and listener (where the listener randomizes her communication) followed by evidence presentation.…”

“…However, it follows from the analysis of Sher (2014) that in the case of unrestricted evidence, persuasion rules are indeed optimal, and, hence, not only the optimal persuasion rule, but also the optimal mechanism, is deterministic. Sher (2014) refers to the persuasion rules of Glazer and Rubinstein (2006) as static persuasion rules, and refers to the mechanisms with back-and-forth cheap talk communication preceding evidence presentation as dynamic persuasion rules. The persuasion rules studied by Glazer and Rubinstein (2004) are dynamic in this sense.…”

Manipulating Persuasion in Debates: Fact Checking’s Usefulness

“…Their aim is to find those mechanisms that maximize the probability that the audience accepts the request when it is justified and rejected the request when it is unjustified. In [5] there is an extention of the analysis of a dynamic environment. Moreover, it is depicted a single linear program to find the optimal rule in a context that involves back-and-forth communication.…”

Effective Persuasion

“…Other related papers include those by Dziuda (), Kamenica and Gentzkow (), Olszewski (), Sher (, ), and Thordal‐Le Quement (). These papers also study the choice of arguments or questions in the context of persuasion or information elicitation.…”