Persuading voters

In a symmetric information voting model, an individual (information controller) can influence voters’ choices by designing the information content of a public signal. We characterize the controller’s optimal signal. With a non-unanimous voting rule, she exploits voters’ heterogeneity by designing a signal with realizations targeting di↵erent winning-coalitions. Consequently, under simple-majority voting rule, a majority of voters might be strictly worse o↵ due to the controller’s influence. We characterize voters’ preferences over electoral rules, and provide conditions for a majority of voters to prefer a supermajority (or unanimity) voting rule, in order to induce the controller to supply a more informative signal

Persuading skeptics and reaffirming believers

In a world where rational individuals may hold different prior beliefs, a sender can influence the behavior of a receiver by controlling the informativeness of a signal. We characterize the set of distributions of posterior beliefs that can be induced by a signal, and provide necessary and sufficient conditions for a sender to benefit from information control. We examine a class of models with no value of information control under common priors, and show that a sender generically benefits from information control under heterogeneous priors. We extend our analysis to cases where the receiver’s prior is unknown to the sender

Learning about challengers

We examine a political agency problem in repeated elections where an incumbent runs against a challenger from the opposing party, whose policy preferences are unknown by voters. We first ask: do voters benefit from attracting a pool of challengers with more moderate ideologies? When voters and politicians are patient, moderating the ideology distribution of centrist and moderate politicians (those close to the median voter) reduces voter welfare by reducing an extreme incumbent's incentives to compromise. We then ask: do voters benefit from informative signals about a challenger's true ideology? We prove that giving voters informative, but sufficiently noisy, signals always harm voters, because they make it harder for incumbents to secure re-election

On the value of persuasion by experts

A sender can influence the behavior of a receiver by controlling the informativeness of a public signal. We show that the sender cannot benefit from becoming an expert, that is, from privately learning some information about the state. We then show that in some instances an uninformed sender is ex-ante strictly better off than an expert sender

Organizing data analytics

We develop a theory of credible skepticism in organizations to explain the main tradeoffs in organizing data generation, analysis, and reporting. In our designer-agent-principal game, the designer selects the information privately observed by the agent who can misreport it at a cost, whereas the principal can audit the report. We study three organizational levers: tampering prevention, tampering detection, and the allocation of the experimental-design task. We show that motivating informative experimentation while discouraging misreporting are often conflicting organizational goals. To incentivize experimentation, the principal foregoes a flawless tampering detection/prevention system and separates the tasks of experimental design and analysis

Persuading voters

In a symmetric information voting model, an individual (politician) can influence voters' choices by strategically designing a policy experiment (public signal). We characterize the politician's optimal experiment. With a non-unanimous voting rule, she exploits voters' heterogeneity by designing an experiment with realizations targeting different winning coalitions. Consequently, under a simple-majority rule, a majority of voters might be strictly worse off due to the politician's influence. We characterize voters' preferences over electoral rules and provide conditions for a majority of voters to prefer a supermajority (or unanimity) voting rule, in order to induce the politician to supply a more informative experiment

Political disagreement and information in elections

We study the role of re-election concerns in incumbent parties' incentives to shape the information that reaches voters. In a probabilistic voting model, candidates representing two groups of voters compete for office. In equilibrium, the candidate representing the majority wins with a probability that increases in the degree of political disagreement — the difference in expected payoffs from the candidates' policies. Prior to the election, the office-motivated incumbent party (IP) can influence the degree of disagreement through policy experimentation — a public signal about a payoff-relevant state. We show that if the IP supports the majority candidate, then it strategically designs this experiment to increase disagreement and, hence, the candidate's victory probability. We define conditions such that the IP chooses an upper-censoring experiment and the experiment's informativeness decreases with the majority candidate's competence. The IP uses the experiment to increase disagreement even when political disagreement is due solely to belief disagreement

On the value of persuasion by experts

We consider a persuasion model in which a sender influences the actions of a receiver by selecting an experiment (public signal) from a set of feasible experiments. We ask: does the sender benefit from becoming an expert — observing a private signal prior to her selection? We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for a sender to never gain by becoming informed. Our key condition (sequential redundancy) shows that the informativeness of public experiments can substitute for the sender's expertise. We then provide conditions for private information to strictly benefit or strictly hurt the sender. Expertise is beneficial when the sender values the ability to change her experimental choice according to her private information. When the sender does not gain from expertise, she is strictly hurt when different types cannot pool on an optimal experiment

Bayesian persuasion with heterogeneous priors

In a world in which rational individuals may hold different prior beliefs, a sender can influence the behavior of a receiver by controlling the informativeness of an experiment (public signal). We characterize the set of distributions of posterior beliefs that can be induced by an experiment, and provide necessary and sufficient conditions for a sender to benefit from persuasion. We then provide sufficient conditions for the sender to benefit from persuasion for almost every pair of prior beliefs, even when there is no value of persuasion under a common prior. Our main condition is that the receiver's action depends on his beliefs only through his expectation of some random variable