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arXiv · 2011.13846

Persuading a Wishful Thinker

Victor Augias·Daniel M. A. Barreto
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Abstract

We study a persuasion problem in which a sender designs an information structure to induce a non-Bayesian receiver to take a particular action. The receiver, who is privately informed about his preferences, is a wishful thinker: he is systematically overoptimistic about the most favorable outcomes. We show that wishful thinking can lead to a qualitative shift in the structure of optimal persuasion compared to the Bayesian case, whenever the sender is uncertain about what the receiver perceives as the best-case outcome in his decision problem.

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Victor Augias, Daniel M. A. Barreto. 2020-11-27. Persuading a Wishful Thinker. https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.13846

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