Research

Presented at Media Forensics Hub Lunch, Clemson University

We study persuasion when a sender communicates through reviewers whose private reporting types map states into signals. The sender garbles information by managing the distribution of these reviewer mappings. When the receiver observes only a coarse statistic of this distribution, the sender can secretly substitute reviewer types within an observational cell. Observability of implementation therefore becomes a commitment problem. This mapping-management perspective structurally characterizes partial commitment and its effect on persuasion. The sender can commit to an information structure only if it lies in the convex hull of the cellwise mappings selected by its own value vector. This characterization turns partial commitment into a geometric admissibility constraint on the sender’s strategies. The constraint impairs persuasion by forcing the sender to choose a suboptimal admissible strategy, or by making the standard-persuasion optimum admissible only at a discounted value. For policy design, the framework indicates which reviewer types should be observable for given objectives, including robustness, rather than treating full transparency as the only benchmark.

Presented at 2025 Midwest International Trade & Theory Conference at the Pennsylvania State University, EEA 2025 at Bordeaux School of Economics, 36th Stony Brook International Conference on Game Theory at Stony Brook University, 2023 Hong Kong Economic Association Biennial Conference at the University of Hong Kong

Frictions in a Bayesian persuasion game, such as the receiver's rational inattention, can constrain the feasible information structures beyond Bayes' plausibility. In a conventional persuasion scenario with a binary state and binary action, we examine the properties of the inattention constraint under which the sender is likely to benefit from extending the persuasion game. These properties transform the sender's persuasion problem into an intertemporal one, where her strategy not only determines the current chance to succeed but also the receiver's prior belief in the next persuasion attempt, if necessary. In contrast to the optimal static persuasion strategy, the intertemporal approach may lead the sender to adopt a “piecemeal” information disclosure strategy, where she sacrifices the chance of immediate success to ensure that the receiver can be persuaded in subsequent attempts should her current attempt fail. While extending the persuasion game can improve overall persuasiveness beyond the static efficiency level, frictional constraints continue to define the efficiency limits of this sequential strategy. Friction-free efficiency remains unattainable, even with unlimited opportunities to persuade.

Present at 2025 Asia-Pacific Industrial Organization Conference (APIOC) at the University of Queensland, Department of Economics at Auburn University, 2024 Midwest International Trade & Theory Conference at the University of Rochester, 19th Economics Graduate Student Conference at Washington University in St. Louis, 2024 Annual Conference of EARIE at the University of Amsterdam, 2023 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Phoenix, AZ. Accepted for presentation at 36th Stony Brook International Conference on Game Theory at Stony Brook University

In conspicuous consumption, if consumers lack information about market demand, they are uncertain about the exclusivity for which they are willing to pay a premium. The price set by a monopolistic firm with an information advantage can be a signal of product exclusivity to consumers. In a signaling game, we show that the consumer's heuristic, that higher prices justify higher levels of exclusivity, supports the equilibria where prices are pooling or separating signals. In these equilibria, as compared to the perfect-information benchmark, the firm earns a higher profit in the premium luxury market, where most potential consumers are high-type, and a lower profit in the affordable luxury market, where there is a large proportion of low-type consumers. In addition, the difference in consumption value between high- and low-type consumers, as well as consumers' preference for exclusivity, affect the firm's profit in imperfect-information equilibria, which generate important managerial implications for product design and marketing strategies.

Presented at 2023 Midwest International Trade & Theory Conference at Georgia Institute of Technology

The sender may have to use the same persuasion strategy to persuade a group of receivers. An optimal strategy to persuade targeted receivers may provide unnecessary information to some other receivers with different prior beliefs. Such unnecessary information may change these receivers' beliefs and actions in ways that the sender does not desire, resulting in over-persuasion. This study investigates when the over-persuasion issue arises and how mechanism design can address it. We propose a mechanism in which contract transfer is contingent on signal realizations. Receivers can accept the contract to process the persuasion signals and pay the transfer, or they can decline it and maintain their prior beliefs. The mechanism exploits confirmation bias, which arises from receivers' heterogeneous beliefs, to create their heterogeneous incentives to accept the contract. We apply the general theorem to the market with a monopolistic seller and heterogeneous consumers who are uncertain about the product's value. This application demonstrates an important managerial implication for the optimal pricing of a product trial or demo, which was largely overlooked previously.