A Concavification Approach to Ambiguous Persuasion

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that ambiguous persuasion can be analyzed using a concavification approach similar to Bayesian persuasion, allowing for equivalent reformulations through utility distortions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel construction of ambiguous persuasion and shows its value can be characterized by a concavification program akin to Bayesian persuasion.

Findings

Ambiguous persuasion value can be expressed via concavification.

Ambiguous persuasion game can be reformulated as Bayesian persuasion.

Utility functions can be distorted to achieve equivalence.

Abstract

This note shows that the value of ambiguous persuasion characterized in Beauchene, Li and Li(2019) can be given by a concavification program as in Bayesian persuasion (Kamenica and Gentzkow, 2011). In addition, it implies that an ambiguous persuasion game can be equivalently formalized as a Bayesian persuasion game by distorting the utility functions. This result is obtained under a novel construction of ambiguous persuasion.