Denis Shishkin, University of California, San Diego

"Persuasion via Weak Institutions"

Abstract

A sender commissions a study to persuade a receiver, but influences the report with some state-dependent probability. We show that increasing this probability can benefit the receiver and can lead to a discontinuous drop in the sender’s payoffs. We also examine a public-persuasion setting, where we show the sender especially prefers her report to be immune to influence in bad states. To derive our results, we geometrically characterize the sender’s highest equilibrium payoff, which is based on the concave envelope of her capped value function.

(Joint with Elliot Lipnowski and Doron Ravid)
Contact person: Egor Starkov