On Optimal Rules of Persuasion

A speaker wishes to persuade a listener to accept a certain request. The conditions under which the request is justified, from the listener's point of view, depend on the values of two aspects. The values of the aspects are known only to the speaker and the listener can check the value of at mo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Econometrica 2004-11, Vol.72 (6), p.1715-1736
Main Authors: Glazer, Jacob, Rubinstein, Ariel
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Applications
Applied sciences
Calculus of variations and optimal control
debates
Design
Determinism
Discourse
Econometrics
Employment
Exact sciences and technology
Experimental design
Game theory
hard evidence
Insurance, economics, finance
Job performance evaluation
Linear programming
Lotteries
Mathematical analysis
Mathematical models
Mathematical monotonicity
Mathematical programming
Mathematics
Mechanism design
Operational research and scientific management
Operational research. Management science
Persuasion
Probability and statistics
Random allocation
Sciences and techniques of general use
Statistics
Studies
Triangles
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Summary:A speaker wishes to persuade a listener to accept a certain request. The conditions under which the request is justified, from the listener's point of view, depend on the values of two aspects. The values of the aspects are known only to the speaker and the listener can check the value of at most one. A mechanism specifies a set of messages that the speaker can send and a rule that determines the listener's response, namely, which aspect he checks and whether he accepts or rejects the speaker's request. We study mechanisms that maximize the probability that the listener accepts the request when it is justified and rejects the request when it is unjustified, given that the speaker maximizes the probability that his request is accepted. We show that a simple optimal mechanism exists and can be found by solving a linear programming problem in which the set of constraints is derived from what we call the L-principle.
ISSN:0012-9682
1468-0262
DOI:10.1111/j.1468-0262.2004.00551.x