Persuasion with simplistic worldviews

Abstract We study a Bayesian persuasion model with two-dimensional states of the world, in which the sender (she) and receiver (he) have heterogeneous prior beliefs and care about different dimensions. The receiver is a naive agent who has a simplistic worldview : while he knows the correct marginal distributions of the dimensions, he ignores the dependency between the two dimensions of the state. As a benchmark, we first characterize optimal disclosure when the receiver is rational, i.e. when the receiver knows the correct prior distribution and thus shares a common prior with the sender. Then, we provide a characterization for the sender’s gain from persuasion when the receiver is naive, and contrast our results to the benchmark. Finally, we show that the receiver benefits from having a simplistic worldview if and only if it makes him perceive the states in which his interest is aligned with the sender as less likely.