Data-Driven Persuasion

Fuente: arXiv
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Autore principale: Rosenthal, Maxwell
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Rosenthal, Maxwell
author_facet Rosenthal, Maxwell
contents This paper develops a data-driven approach to Bayesian persuasion. The receiver is privately informed about the prior distribution of the state of the world, the sender knows the receiver's preferences but does not know the distribution of the state variable, and the sender's payoffs depend on the receiver's action but not on the state. Prior to interacting with the receiver, the sender observes the distribution of actions taken by a population of decision makers who share the receiver's preferences in best response to an unobserved distribution of messages generated by an unknown and potentially heterogeneous signal. The sender views any prior that rationalizes this data as plausible and seeks a signal that maximizes her worst-case payoff against the set of all such distributions. We show positively that the two-state many-action problem has a saddle point and negatively that the two-action many-state problem does not. In the former case, we identify adversarial priors and optimal signals. In the latter, we characterize the set of robustly optimal Blackwell experiments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_03203
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Data-Driven Persuasion
Rosenthal, Maxwell
Theoretical Economics
Computer Science and Game Theory
This paper develops a data-driven approach to Bayesian persuasion. The receiver is privately informed about the prior distribution of the state of the world, the sender knows the receiver's preferences but does not know the distribution of the state variable, and the sender's payoffs depend on the receiver's action but not on the state. Prior to interacting with the receiver, the sender observes the distribution of actions taken by a population of decision makers who share the receiver's preferences in best response to an unobserved distribution of messages generated by an unknown and potentially heterogeneous signal. The sender views any prior that rationalizes this data as plausible and seeks a signal that maximizes her worst-case payoff against the set of all such distributions. We show positively that the two-state many-action problem has a saddle point and negatively that the two-action many-state problem does not. In the former case, we identify adversarial priors and optimal signals. In the latter, we characterize the set of robustly optimal Blackwell experiments.
title Data-Driven Persuasion
topic Theoretical Economics
Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.03203