English

Perfect Bayesian Persuasion

Theoretical Economics 2024-02-13 v1

Abstract

A sender commits to an experiment to persuade a receiver. Accounting for the sender's experiment-choice incentives, and not presupposing a receiver tie-breaking rule when indifferent, we characterize when the sender's equilibrium payoff is unique and so coincides with her "Bayesian persuasion" value. A sufficient condition in finite models is that every action which is receiver-optimal at some belief is uniquely optimal at some other belief -- a generic property. We similarly show the equilibrium sender payoff is typically unique in ordered models. In an extension, we show uniqueness generates robustness to imperfect sender commitment.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2402.06765,
  title  = {Perfect Bayesian Persuasion},
  author = {Elliot Lipnowski and Doron Ravid and Denis Shishkin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.06765},
  year   = {2024}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T14:44:37.031Z