Riassunto analitico
We take as a starting point the sender-receiver model provided in Bilancini and Boncinelli (2013) where, through the insights of social and cognitive psychology, the implications of persuasion in social life are analyzed. From the psychological literature two distinct features are borrowed: the presence of elaboration costs to extract all information from a message, and the constraint on the elaboration process by which the receiver is affected -- i.e. he refers the offer to a mental category of offers with similar features. In the former the recipient has to sustain a cognitive cost, in order to fully and correctly elaborate the information. In the latter the receiver who does not sustain the elaboration cost is affected by "coarse thinking", namely he is unable to distinguish among offers that belong to the same mental category. Taking these results as a reference, we provide a framework in which the persuader finds profitable to deceive the individuals who think coarsely. More precisely we provide a definition of deception (Active Harmful Deception) that is congruous to that defined in the work of Heidhues and Koszegi (2012), and we analize the cases in which such activity occurs -- i.e. when the persuader deceives successfully the receiver exploiting his optimal behaviour. We find that when such circumstance arises, this kind of behaviour is sustained in many types of equilibria, including pooling and separating ones that do not rely on the single-crossing property. Furthermore, we provide the existence of a separating equilibrium, defined as counter-signaling equilibrium, wherein each type of persuader finds optimal to refer his offer to a category to which he does not belong. As a final result, the model sheds light on the possibility of a deceptive behaviour in several kinds of market, in which firms can profitably sell wasteful products to full rational consumers.
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Abstract
We take as a starting point the sender-receiver model provided in Bilancini and Boncinelli (2013) where, through the insights of social and cognitive psychology, the implications of persuasion in social life are analyzed. From the psychological literature two distinct features are borrowed: the presence of elaboration costs to extract all information from a message, and the constraint on the elaboration process by which the receiver is affected -- i.e. he refers the offer to a mental category of offers with similar features. In the former the recipient has to sustain a cognitive cost, in order to fully and correctly elaborate the information. In the latter the receiver who does not sustain the elaboration cost is affected by "coarse thinking", namely he is unable to distinguish among offers that belong to the same mental category. Taking these results as a reference, we provide a framework in which the persuader finds profitable to deceive the individuals who think coarsely. More precisely we provide a definition of deception (Active Harmful Deception) that is congruous to that defined in the work of Heidhues and Koszegi (2012), and we analize the cases in which such activity occurs -- i.e. when the persuader deceives successfully the receiver exploiting his optimal behaviour. We find that when such circumstance arises, this kind of behaviour is sustained in many types of equilibria, including pooling and separating ones that do not rely on the single-crossing property. Furthermore, we provide the existence of a separating equilibrium, defined as counter-signaling equilibrium, wherein each type of persuader finds optimal to refer his offer to a category to which he does not belong. As a final result, the model sheds light on the possibility of a deceptive behaviour in several kinds of market, in which firms can profitably sell wasteful products to full rational consumers.
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