The Value of Mediated Communication

Andrés Salamanca (1)

1 TSE-R - Toulouse School of Economics

Kamenica and Gentzkow (2011) consider a model in which a sender chooses a public communication device for signaling his information to an uninformed receiver, who then takes an action that affects the welfare of both individuals. In their model, the sender is fully committed to truthfully communicate the signal to the receiver, so that they abstract from incentive compatibility issues. By considering mediated communication, we provide an analytical framework overcoming this overly restrictive assumption. Specifically, we are able to characterize incentive constraints by a set of linear inequalities, which allows to formulate the sender's problem as a linear programming problem. As a result, we can use an alternative geometric approach based on duality theory to transform the sender's problem into a simplified problem without incentive constraints that can be solved using concavification arguments.

Mots clés: Bayesian persuasion; mediated communication; incentive compatibility; virtual utility

Domaines: Economies et finances

Andrés Salamanca. The Value of Mediated Communication. 2016. ⟨hal-01289379v3⟩