Starting rough, Dynamic persuasion with partial information

Abstract

This study builds upon a Bayesian persuasion model (Kamenica and Gentzkow, 2011), extending it to two stages where the sender observes signals correlated with the persistent state instead of directly observing it. We demonstrate that the uncertainty about the state yields an optimal persuasion policy involving starting rough: the sender maximizes the second stage’s payoff by forgoing persuasion in the first stage.