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arXiv · 2408.01250

Persuading an inattentive and privately informed receiver

Pietro Dall'Ara
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Abstract

This paper studies the persuasion of a receiver who accesses information only if she exerts costly attention effort. A sender designs an experiment to persuade the receiver to take a specific action. The experiment affects the receiver's attention effort, that is, the probability that she updates her beliefs. Persuasion has two margins: an extensive (effort) and an intensive (action). The receiver's utility exhibits a supermodularity property in information and effort. By leveraging this property, we establish an equivalence between experiments and persuasion mechanisms \`a la Kolotilin et al.~(2017). In applications, the sender's optimal strategy involves censoring favorable states.

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Pietro Dall'Ara. 2024-08-02. Persuading an inattentive and privately informed receiver. https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.01250

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