The Simple Economics of Optimal Persuasion

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Dworczak, Piotr; Martini, Giorgio
• 署名单位: Northwestern University; Stanford University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-3808
• DOI: 10.1086/701813
• 发表日期: 2019
• 页码: 1993-2048
• 关键词: Information disclosure

摘要

We propose a price-theoretic approach to Bayesian persuasion by establishing an analogy between the sender's problem and finding Walrasian equilibria of a persuasion economy. The sender, who acts as a consumer, purchases posterior beliefs at their prices using the prior distribution as her endowment. A single firm has the technology to garble the state. Welfare theorems provide a verification tool for optimality of a persuasion scheme and characterize the structure of prices that support the optimal solution. This approach yields a tractable solution method for persuasion problems in which the sender's utility depends only on the expected state.