Conferences at Department of Economics, University of Toronto, Canadian Economic Theory Conference 2019

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Persuading part of an audience

Bruno Salcedo*

Date: 2019-05-04 9:30 am – 10:00 am
Last modified: 2019-04-15

Abstract


I propose a cheap-talk model in which the sender can use private messages and only cares about persuading a subset of her audience. For example, a candidate only needs to persuade a majority of the electorate in order to win an election. I find that senders can gain credibility by speaking truthfully to some receivers while lying to others. The model always admits information transmission in equilibrium for some prior beliefs, and the sender can approximate her preferred outcome when the fraction of the audience she needs to persuade is sufficiently small. I characterize the sender-optimal equilibrium and the value of not having to persuade your whole audience in separable environments. I also extend the model to allow for full-commitment as in Kamenica and Gentzkow (2011). 


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