Adam Smith Business School

Dr Ludvig Sinander, University of Oxford

"The comparative statics of persuasion"
Tuesday, 12 September. 4 pm
Room 356. Main Building

Abstract

In the canonical persuasion model, comparative statics has been an open question. We answer it, delineating which shifts of the sender’s interim payoff lead her optimally to choose a more informative signal. Our first theorem identifies a coarse notion of ‘increased convexity’ that we show characterises those shifts of the sender’s interim payoff that lead her optimally to choose no less informative signals. To strengthen this conclusion to ‘more informative’ requires further assumptions: our second theorem identifies the necessary and sufficient condition on the sender’s interim payoff, which strictly generalises the ‘S’ shape commonly imposed in the literature. We identify conditions under which increased alignment of interests between sender and receiver lead to comparative statics, and study several applications. (with Gregorio Curello)

Bio

Economic theorist with broad interests. PhD from Northwestern, currently a postdoc at Oxford (Dept of Economics & Nuffield College).

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First published: 4 September 2023