CEF.UP – ECO Seminar

Tuesday – April 29^th 2025, at 13:00h | Room 305

Decentralized Persuasion

Itai Arieli –  Faculty of Data and Decision Sciences, TECHNION – Israel Institute of Technology  (Israel), University of Toronto (Canada)

Abstract:

“Information is often distributed across multiple senders. This paper explores the extent to which senders with a common utility function but independent and imperfect information can collaboratively persuade a receiver. We suppose that the senders’ combined information (almost) fully reveals the true state, and compare these senders’ attainable utility to the maximum achievable by a single, fully informed sender. We show that decentralized senders cannot generally attain this maximum, except in cases where fully revealing a state is optimal. On the positive side, we show that they can guarantee a constant fraction of this maximum, and that the maximum itself can be obtained if senders have access to a public randomization device.”