Persuading a Credible Agent
Jiarui Gan, Abheek Ghosh, Nicholas Teh

TL;DR
This paper investigates optimal persuasion strategies in a setting with credible agents, revealing that standard mechanisms are often suboptimal and proposing multi-stage mechanisms with pre-signaling and non-binding elicitation for improved outcomes.
Contribution
It introduces a new credible agent model, demonstrating the limitations of traditional mechanisms and developing a polynomial-time algorithm for optimal multi-stage mechanisms.
Findings
Standard incentive compatible mechanisms may be suboptimal in credible settings.
Optimal mechanisms require multi-stage processes with pre-signaling and non-binding elicitation.
Partial information elicitation can further enhance the principal's payoff.
Abstract
How to optimally persuade an agent who has a private type? When elicitation is feasible, this amounts to a fairly standard principal-agent-style mechanism design problem, where the persuader employs a mechanism to first elicit the agent's type and then plays the corresponding persuasion strategy based on the agent's report. The optimal mechanism design problem in this setting is relatively well-understood in the literature, with incentive compatible (IC) mechanisms known to be optimal and computationally tractable. In this paper, we study this problem given a credible agent, i.e., if the agent claims they are of a certain type in response to the mechanism's elicitation, then they will act optimally with respect to the claimed type, even if they are actually not of that type. We present several interesting findings in this new setting that differ significantly from results in the…
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Taxonomy
TopicsTerrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence · Misinformation and Its Impacts · Intelligence, Security, War Strategy
