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Robust persuasion of a privately informed receiver

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Abstract

This paper studies robust Bayesian persuasion of a privately informed receiver in a binary environment, where an ambiguity-averse sender with a maxmin expected utility function has limited knowledge about the receiver’s private information source. We develop a novel method to solve the sender’s information design problem. Our main result shows that the sender’s optimal information structure can be found within the class of linear-contingent-payoff information structures. We also fully characterize the sender’s optimal linear-contingent-payoff information structure and analyze the impact of ambiguity on the sender’s payoff.

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Correspondence to Ju Hu.

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Hu and Weng would like to acknowledge the financial support of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 71803004 and 71973002)

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Hu, J., Weng, X. Robust persuasion of a privately informed receiver. Econ Theory 72, 909–953 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00199-020-01299-5

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