Persuading while Learning

TL;DR

This paper develops a dynamic persuasion model where an impatient sender learns over time and chooses how much information to reveal to persuade an agent to adopt a product, revealing full information if sufficiently impatient.

Contribution

It introduces a novel model of dynamic persuasion with learning, characterizes optimal strategies as interval-based, and shows full transparency under impatience with a random walk martingale.

Findings

Optimal strategies form an interval set of realizations for adoption.

Sufficient impatience leads to full transparency in information disclosure.

The model applies to scenarios with martingale learning processes.

Abstract

We propose a dynamic product adoption persuasion model involving an impatient partially informed sender who gradually learns the state. In this model, the sender gathers information over time, and hence her posteriors' sequence forms a discrete-time martingale. The sender commits to a dynamic revelation policy to persuade the agent to adopt a product. We demonstrate that under the assumption that the sender's martingale possesses Blackwell-preserving kernels, the family of optimal strategies for the sender takes an interval form; namely, in every period the set of martingale realizations in which adoption occurs is an interval. Utilizing this, we prove that if the sender is sufficiently impatient, then under a random walk martingale, the optimal policy is fully transparent up to the moment of adoption; namely, the sender reveals the entire information she privately holds in every period.