Resisting Persuasion

22 Pages Posted: 18 Sep 2017 Last revised: 28 Dec 2020

See all articles by Elias Tsakas

Elias Tsakas

Maastricht University - Department of Economics

Nikolas Tsakas

University of Cyprus - Department of Economics

Dimitrios Xefteris

University of Cyprus

Date Written: September 15, 2017

Abstract

In the context of Bayesian Persuasion (Kamenica and Gentzkow, 2011), typically, a biased Sender designs a signal to influence the binary decision of an unbiased Receiver. Can the Receiver improve her payoffs by adopting a resistance strategy, i.e., by committing into incurring (deterministic or stochastic) costs if she picks the Sender-preferred action? We argue that deterministic resistance strategies cannot improve the Receiver's payoffs, whereas stochastic resistance strategies can increase both the informativeness of the signal and the Receiver's payoffs. We fully characterize the optimal resistance strategy and show that it always induces a substantial increase in the Receiver's welfare, as well as a perfectly informative signal.

Keywords: Bayesian Persuasion, Resistance, Uncertainty, Public Commitment

JEL Classification: D72, D82, D83, K40, M38

Suggested Citation

Tsakas, Elias and Tsakas, Nikolas and Xefteris, Dimitrios, Resisting Persuasion (September 15, 2017). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3037349 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3037349

Elias Tsakas

Maastricht University - Department of Economics ( email )

P.O. Box 616
Maastricht, 6200 MD
Netherlands

Nikolas Tsakas (Contact Author)

University of Cyprus - Department of Economics ( email )

75 Kallipoleos Street
P.O. Box 20537
1678 Nicosia
Cyprus

Dimitrios Xefteris

University of Cyprus ( email )

75 Kallipoleos Street
P.O. Box 20537
1678 Nicosia
Cyprus

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