Internal Seminar: Pietro Dall'Ara (visitor from Boston College)

Abstract

Would a receiver pay to be persuaded by a sender? I study the persuasion of a receiver who takes a binary action, and who accesses the sender’s information only after exerting attention effort. The sender uses information as a reward to induce costly attention effort. I show the equivalence between persuasion mechanisms and signals when the receiver’s private information includes her effort cost. The optimal signal takes the form of an upper censorship in common applications, and of a bi-upper censorship in a general model of media capture.