Persuasion and Welfare

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Doval, Laura; Smolin, Alex
• 署名单位: Columbia University; Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR); Universite de Toulouse; Universite Toulouse 1 Capitole; Toulouse School of Economics
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-3808
• DOI: 10.1086/729067
• 发表日期: 2024
• 页码: 2451-2487
• 关键词: Bayesian persuasion; disclosure; DESIGN

摘要

Information policies such as scores, ratings, and recommendations are increasingly shaping society's choices in high-stakes domains. We provide a framework to study the welfare implications of information policies on a population of heterogeneous individuals. We define and characterize the Bayes welfare set, consisting of the population's utility profiles that are feasible under some information policy. The Pareto frontier of this set can be recovered by a series of standard Bayesian persuasion problems. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions under which an information policy exists that Pareto dominates the no-information policy. We illustrate our results with applications to data leakage, price discrimination, and credit ratings.