Discriminatory Persuasion

Abstract

Whether someone can persuade someone else to do something depends on who knows what? This paper provides a generic approach to persuade a receiver to take an action on which the receiver has private information. The key of this approach lies in exploiting two kinds of errors the receiver may commit: taking an harmful action and failing to take a beneficial action. The best persuasion strategy gives the receiver a choice of having a larger chance to commit either the first or the second kind of error.

Keywords: Persuasion, Private Information, Specificity-Sensitivity Tradeoff