Persuasive Games Research Articles

Climate politics: How public persuasion affects the trade-off between environmental and economic performance

This paper aims at studying the impact of public persuasion, through information dissemination, on environmental and economic performance. A differential game in which opposite interest groups compete for bringing the majority’s environmental concern closer to their views is developed. The results show a strong asymmetry in the impact of public persuasion. It may bring the median voter economy closer to the social optimum in the long run, thereby reducing environmental and economic distortions. But this only occurs when the environmental group exhibits a radical ideology and people are initially closer to the industrialists’ views. By contrast, economies where industrial groups are powerful and strongly opposed to environmental protection never benefit from the outcome of the game of persuasion. This may explain why the US have failed to take action on global warming up to now.

Coordination and Private Information Revelation

This paper examines a persuasion game between two agents with one-sided asymmetric information, where the informed agent can reveal her private information prior to playing a Battle-of-the-Sexes coordination game. There is a close connection between the extent of information revelation and the possibility of coordination failure; while, in the absence of any coordination failure, there exist equilibria with full disclosure, in the presence of strategic uncertainty in coordination there exists an equilibrium with no information revelation. We provide a purification argument for the non-existence result, as well demonstrate that it is robust to several extensions, including both-sided asymmetric information and imprecise information revelation.

Bayesian Comparative Statics

We study how information affects equilibria and welfare in games. For an agent, more precise information about an unknown state of the world leads to a mean-preserving spread of beliefs. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions to obtain either a non-increasing-mean or a non-decreasing-mean spread of actions whenever information precision increases for at least one agent. We apply our Bayesian comparative statics framework to study informational externalities in strategic environments. In persuasion games, we derive sufficient conditions that lead to extremal disclosure of information. In oligopolistic markets, we characterize the incentives of firms to share information. In macroeconomic models, we show that information not only drives the amplitude of business cycles but also affects aggregate output. Finally, in a novel application, we compare the demand for information in covert and overt information acquisition games.

Vague lies and lax standards of proof: On the law and economics of advice

AbstractThis paper analyzes a persuasion game where a seller provides (un)biased and (im)precise advice and may be fined by an authority for misleading the buyers. In the equilibrium, biasing the advice and making it noisier are complements. The advice becomes both more biased and less precise with a stricter standard of proof employed by the authority, a larger share of credulous consumers, and a higher buyers' heterogeneity. The optimal policy of the authority is characterized in terms of a standard of proof and resources devoted to the investigation.

Information-Theoretic Limits of Strategic Communication

In this article, we investigate strategic information transmission over a noisy channel. This problem has been widely investigated in Economics, when the communication channel is perfect. Unlike in Information Theory, both encoder and decoder have distinct objectives and choose their encoding and decoding strategies accordingly. This approach radically differs from the conventional Communication paradigm, which assumes transmitters are of two types: either they have a common goal, or they act as opponent, e.g. jammer, eavesdropper. We formulate a point-to-point source-channel coding problem with state information, in which the encoder and the decoder choose their respective encoding and decoding strategies in order to maximize their long-run utility functions. This strategic coding problem is at the interplay between Wyner-Ziv’s scenario and the Bayesian persuasion game of Kamenica-Gentzkow. We characterize a single-letter solution and we relate it to the previous results by using the concavification method. This confirms the benefit of sending encoded data bits even if the decoding process is not supervised, e.g. when the decoder is an autonomous device. Our solution has two interesting features: it might be optimal not to use all channel resources; the informational content impacts the encoding process, since utility functions capture preferences on source symbols.

Play to win over: Effects of persuasive games.

Persuasive games are a subset of serious games that are getting increased attention from the gaming industry as well as researchers. Although their title implies they can be intuitively defined as having the primary intention of changing or reinforcing players’ attitudes on certain topics, only a handful of studies have provided evidence that these games actually influence attitudes. After presenting a summary of previous studies’ results, the current article expands on this evidence by reporting on a controlled online experiment that compared a currently playable persuasive game (My Cotton Picking Life) with a mobilizing YouTube clip covering the same topic. The study included a pre- and posttest and 2 media conditions. Two hundred thirty-seven individuals (mean age of 23) from an international population participated in this study. Because the persuasive game and comparable movie clip were concerned with forced labor in Uzbekistani cotton fields, attitude scales on empowerment, the workload of cotton picking, and denial of the issue, were composed for this study and subsequently validated. Results showed a greater increase on workload attitudes for individuals who played the game than for those who watched the clip. Enjoyment of the game as well as awareness of the game’s intent also increased the attitude change from pre- to posttest. The paper offers insight into how persuasive games can be further validated with different methods, and concludes that there is mounting evidence for the viability of games as a medium for persuasive communication. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

Investigating the Effects of a Persuasive Digital Game on Immersion, Identification, and Willingness to Help

Recent years have seen a tremendous rise in the development and distribution of persuasive games: digital games that are used to influence players’ attitudes and/or behavior. Three studies (N Study 1 = 134; N Study 2 = 94; N Study 3 = 161) tested the effects of a persuasive game on immersion, identification, and willingness to help. The results showed that playing the persuasive game did not result in substantially stronger willingness to help, relative to the control conditions. Video and printed text resulted in more immersion than the digital game, but playing the game resulted in substantially higher perceptions of embodied presence.

On Bayesian persuasion with multiple senders

In a canonical multi-sender Bayesian persuasion game, Gentzkow and Kamenica (2017) show that increasing the number of senders cannot decrease the amount of information revealed. They assume: (i) information can be arbitrarily correlated, (ii) senders reveal information simultaneously, and (iii) senders play pure strategies. This paper constructs examples that demonstrate that adding senders can result in a loss of information if any of these assumptions is violated.

Shattering the Single European Sky: Argument from authorities in dealing with the SES initiative

ABSTRACTThe article scrutinises the European Commission’s Single European Sky (SES) initiative from a neoinstitutionalist epistemic governance perspective. The focus is on the rhetorical tools actors deploy in accounting for SES and the problems in it. We argue that the slow progress made in realising SES is not simply due to conflicting national interests. Member states are not uniform actors with a single, easily defined will or interest but rather, several entities appeal to national interests and other shared values to defend their position in the process. The delay in realising SES does not stem from the Commission’s inability to reconcile the distinct stakeholder interests but it is due to diverse discursive skirmishes the SES project has triggered. These skirmishes amount to a persuasion game whereby various actors account for SES in ways that do not endanger their own interests in the initiative, thus constantly transforming the SES project and its outcomes.

A cookbook method for Persuasive Game Design

Despite the growing interest in persuasive game design, there have been few methods which cover the complete process of game design that designers could draw upon in their practice. In this paper, the Persuasive Game Design method(PGD) is presented as a non-directive approach for designing persuasive games including a practical hand-out. To better fit with the practical constraints encountered in game design, this method adopts a “cookbook” approach. A set of essential PGD components and tools are provided from which game designers can choose from, given their specific context and resources. Designers first consider the game design steps(“dishes”) to use in creating their game and in each step, select which components(“ingredients”) to take into account and tools(“utensils”) to use. The proposed method, based on our experience as persuasive game researchers and design practitioners, is further refined using feedback from professional game designers. The paper concludes with a case study illustrating how to put the meal into practice. Overall, the method provides a useful contribution to the existing research domain by combining knowledge from game theory, game design and design methodology to create a structured yet flexible approach which covers the complete persuasive game design process for researchers, students and practitioners.

Does Imperfect Data Privacy Stop People from Collecting Personal Data?

Many companies try to access personal information to discriminate among consumers. We analyse how privacy regulations affect the acquisition and disclosure of information in a simple game of persuasion. Theory predicts that no data will be acquired with Disclosure Duty of collected data whereas Consent Law with perfect privacy results in complete information acquisition. Imperfect privacy, i.e., an environment in which leaks of collected data are possible, gives rise to multiple equilibria. Results from a laboratory experiment confirm the qualitative differences between Consent Law and Disclosure Duty and show that imperfect privacy does not stop people from collecting personal information.

Strategic Reasoning in Persuasion Games: An Experiment

We study experimentally persuasion games in which a sender (e.g., a seller) with private information provides verifiable but potentially vague information (e.g., about the quality of a product) to a receiver (e.g., a buyer). Various theoretical solution concepts such as sequential equilibrium or iterated admissibility predict unraveling of information. Iterative admissibility also provides predictions for every finite level of reasoning about rationality. Overall we observe behavior consistent with relatively high levels of reasoning. While iterative admissibility implies that the level of reasoning required for unraveling is increasing in the number of quality levels, we find only insignificantly more unraveling in a game with two quality levels compared to a game with four quality levels. There is weak evidence for learning higher-level reasoning in later rounds of the experiments. Participants display difficulties in transferring learning to unravel in a game with two quality levels to a game with four quality levels. Finally, participants who score higher on cognitive abilities in Raven's progressive matrices test also display significantly higher levels of reasoning in our persuasion games although the effect-size is small.

When does monitoring hurt? Endogenous information acquisition in a game of persuasion

We study a persuasion game between a decision maker and an expert. Before communication, the expert searches for an evidence about the state of nature. Higher effort leads to a higher probability of discovery. We show that, contrary to everyday experiences, monitoring of effort is always suboptimal if the expert’s bias is large, yet sometimes optimal if the expert’s bias is small.

Benefits from Non-Competing Persuaders

I study Bayesian persuasion games with multiple persuaders in which the persuaders are non-competing: all persuaders want the decision maker to take the same action, regardless of the state. In the case of a single persuader, it is known from previous research that the persuader-optimal information design leaves the decision maker with no surplus. In this paper, I show that with two or more non-competing persuaders and independent tests, there are always equilibria in which the decision maker receives surplus. If there is exogenous noise then the decision maker receives surplus in every symmetric equilibrium, provided the number of persuaders is sufficiently large; asymptotically, the decision maker learns the true state in every Pareto optimal symmetric equilibrium with infinitely many persuaders. Moreover, with sufficient exogenous noise, having more than one persuader not only improves the welfare of the decision maker but also improves the welfare of the persuaders.

On the optimality of diverse expert panels in persuasion games

We consider a persuasion game where the decision-maker relies on a panel of biased experts. An expert's preference is parameterized by his ideal action, or agenda. Common intuition suggests that more information is revealed if the panel includes experts with opposed agendas, because such experts will undo each other's attempts to conceal unfavorable information. In contrast, we show that recruiting experts with diverse agendas is optimal only if the correlation between the experts' types—i.e., whether they are informed or not—is above a threshold. Moreover, if the experts' types are independent, under mild assumptions it is optimal to recruit experts who have extreme but identical agendas. These findings suggest that the diversity of preferences must be considered in conjunction with the diversity of information sources, and it is generally sub-optimal to seek diversity in both dimensions.

Voluntary Bankruptcy as Preemptive Persuasion

This paper examines the phenomenon of management-initiated, court-supervised reorganization of companies in U.S. bankruptcy court. The proposed in-court persuasion mechanism reconciles excessive reorganizations of non-viable companies (and subsequent repeat failures) with management-initiated filings and a judge who aims to always take appropriate action. In the model, management makes a preemptive voluntary filing to retain control of the process, and thereby engage in a game of Bayesian Persuasion with asymmetric information vis-a-vis the judge. This mechanism endogenously results in the reorganization of some non-viable companies, and exclusively management-initiated (i.e., voluntary) bankruptcy filings. This paper, therefore, explains why non-viable companies could be permitted to reorganize and why there are repeat offender firms that enter bankruptcy multiple times.

A model of Bayesian persuasion with transfers

We analyze a persuasion game in which a sender wants to persuade a receiver to take an action. The sender first produces information about the benefits of taking the action and then offers monetary transfers to the receiver. We characterize a sender-optimal information structure and show that limiting monetary payments may incentivize the sender to produce more information.

A Model of Bayesian Persuasion with Transfers

We analyze a persuasion game in which a sender wants to persuade a receiver to take an action. The sender first produces information about the benefits of taking the action and then offers monetary transfers to the receiver. We characterize a sender-optimal information structure and show that limiting monetary payments may incentivize the sender to produce more information.

Insider Investor and Information

After initial investments, relationship financiers typically observe interim about projects before continuing financing them. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs produce endogenously and issue securities to incumbent insider and competitive outsider investors. In such persuasion games with differentially informed receivers and contingent transfers, entrepreneurs' endogenous experimentation reduces insiders' monopoly but impedes relationship formation through an information production hold-up. Insiders' production and interim competition mitigate this hold-up, and jointly explain empirical links between competition and relationship lending. Optimal contracts restore first-best outcomes using convertible securities for insiders and residuals for outsiders. Our findings are robust under various extensions and alternative specifications.

A Study on Persuasive Games by Ian Bogost

A Study on Persuasive Games by Ian Bogost