Strategic Ignorance and Information Design

Taneva, Ina; Wiseman, Thomas

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3997926

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 23 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Later, Morris (2016a,b, 2019) highlighted the connection between optimal information disclosure and the best Bayes correlated equilibrium from the sender's perspective. A number of works deal with the multiple receivers generalization of the model, e.g., Schnakenberg (2015); Taneva (2015); Wang (2013). Among these works, those by Bardhi and Guo (2018), Alonso and Câmara (2016) and Chan et al (2019) are closely related to ours, representing the first attempts of applying the Bayesian persuasion framework to voting problems.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 97%

Persuading Voters: It's Easy to Whisper, It's Hard to Speak Loud

Castiglioni

Celli

Gatti

2020

AAAI

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We focus on the following natural question: is it possible to influence the outcome of a voting process through the strategic provision of information to voters who update their beliefs rationally? We investigate whether it is computationally tractable to design a signaling scheme maximizing the probability with which the sender's preferred candidate is elected. We resort to the model recently introduced by Arieli and Babichenko (2019) (i.e., without inter-agent externalities), and focus on, as illustrative examples, k-voting rules and plurality voting. There is a sharp contrast between the case in which private signals are allowed and the more restrictive setting in which only public signals are allowed. In the former, we show that an optimal signaling scheme can be computed efficiently both under a k-voting rule and plurality voting. In establishing these results, we provide two contributions applicable to general settings beyond voting. Specifically, we extend a well-known result by Dughmi and Xu (2017) to more general settings and prove that, when the sender's utility function is anonymous, computing an optimal signaling scheme is fixed-parameter tractable in the number of receivers' actions. In the public signaling case, we show that the sender's optimal expected return cannot be approximated to within any factor under a k-voting rule. This negative result easily extends to plurality voting and problems where utility functions are anonymous.

show abstract