Related papers: Persuading part of an audience

Many markets rely on traders truthfully communicating who has cheated in the past and ostracizing those traders from future trade. This paper investigates when truthful communication is incentive compatible. We find that if each side has a…

I study a repeated game in which a patient player (e.g., a seller) wants to win the trust of some myopic opponents (e.g., buyers) but can strictly benefit from betraying them. Her benefit from betrayal is strictly positive and is her…

We study a long-run persuasion problem where a long-lived Sender repeatedly interacts with a sequence of short-lived Receivers who may adopt a misspecified model for belief updating. The Sender commits to a stationary information structure,…

We present an equilibrium model of politics in which political platforms compete over public opinion. A platform consists of a policy, a coalition of social groups with diverse intrinsic attitudes to policies, and a narrative. We…

In dialogues in which both agents are autonomous, each agent deliberates whether to accept or reject the contributions of the current speaker. A speaker cannot simply assume that a proposal or an assertion will be accepted. However, an…

We develop a model of opinion dynamics where agents in a social network seek to learn a ground truth among a set of competing hypotheses. Agents in the network form private beliefs about such hypotheses by aggregating their neighbors'…

We study the optimal referral strategy of a seller and its relationship with the type of communication channels among consumers. The seller faces a partially uninformed population of consumers, interconnected through a directed social…

We study an information-structure design problem (a.k.a. persuasion) with a single sender and multiple receivers with actions of a priori unknown types, independently drawn from action-specific marginal distributions. As in the standard…

Many smart grid frameworks, such as demand response programs, require accurate information about consumers' parameters (e.g., flexibility) at the aggregator side to optimize grid operations. Existing works typically rely on perfect…

Since the information available is fundamental for our perceptions and opinions, we are interested in understanding the conditions allowing for a good information to be disseminated. This paper explores opinion dynamics by means of…

In this paper, we consider the transmission of confidential messages over slow fading wireless channels in the presence of an eavesdropper. We propose a transmission scheme that employs a single reconfigurable antenna at each of the…

We consider a set of $n$ messages and a group of $k$ clients. Each client is privileged for receiving an arbitrary subset of the messages over a broadcast erasure channel, which generalizes scenario of a previous work. We propose a method…

Collective estimation is a variant of collective decision-making where agents reach consensus on a continuous quantity through social interactions. Achieving precise consensus is complex due to the co-evolution of opinions and the…

I study a model of advisors with hidden motives: a seller discloses information about an object's value to a potential buyer, who doesn't know the object's value or how profitable the object's sale is to the seller (the seller's motives). I…

We propose a light-weight client-server model of communication between program analyses. Clients are individual analyses and the server mediates their communication. A client cannot see properties of any other and the communication is…

In this paper, we introduce the notion of Plausible Deniability in an information theoretic framework. We consider a scenario where an entity that eavesdrops through a broadcast channel summons one of the parties in a communication protocol…

Given the fast rise of increasingly autonomous artificial agents and robots, a key acceptability criterion will be the possible moral implications of their actions. In particular, intelligent persuasive systems (systems designed to…

Modern decision making tools are based on statistical analysis of abundant data, which is often collected by querying multiple individuals. We consider data collection through crowdsourcing, where independent and self-interested agents,…

Wireless communication is susceptible to adversarial eavesdropping due to the broadcast nature of the wireless medium. In this paper it is shown how eavesdropping can be alleviated by exploiting the superposition property of the wireless…

In persuasion problems where the receiver's action is one-dimensional and his utility is single-peaked, optimal signals are characterized by duality, based on a first-order approach to the receiver's problem. A signal is optimal iff the…