On Optimal Rules of Persuasion
研究一个说话者如何设计沟通机制，以最大化让听话者接受合理请求、拒绝不合理请求的概率，并证明存在一个可通过线性规划求解的简单最优机制。
A speaker wishes to persuade a listener to accept a certain request. The conditions under which the request is justified, from the listener's point of view, depend on the values of two aspects. The values of the aspects are known only to the speaker and the listener can check the value of at most one. A mechanism specifies a set of messages that the speaker can send and a rule that determines the listener's response, namely, which aspect he checks and whether he accepts or rejects the speaker's request. We study mechanisms that maximize the probability that the listener accepts the request when it is justified and rejects the request when it is unjustified, given that the speaker maximizes the probability that his request is accepted. We show that a simple optimal mechanism exists and can be found by solving a linear programming problem in which the set of constraints is derived from what we call the L-principle. Copyright The Econometric Society 2004.