Bayesian persuasion in unlinked games

Originating from Kamenica and Gentzkow (Am Econ Rev 101(6):2590–2615, 2011), we analyze multi-receiver Bayesian persuasion games with heterogeneous beliefs without strategic interactions among receivers, which we call unlinked. We show that given the receivers’ best-responses, the sender’s rationalizable strategies are obtained from a single linear programming problem.

Sequential persuasion

This paper studies sequential Bayesian persuasion games with multiple senders. We provide a tractable characterization of equilibrium outcomes. We apply the model to study how the structure of consultations affects information revelation. Adding a sender who moves first cannot reduce informativeness in equilibrium and results in a more informative equilibrium in the case of two states. Moreover, with the exception of the first sender, it is without loss of generality to let each sender move only once. Sequential persuasion cannot generate a more informative equilibrium than simultaneous persuasion and is always less informative when there are only two states.

Race consciousness, the audacity of equality, and transcultural criticism in Hasan Minhaj’s homecoming king.

This article examines the role of the diasporic stand-up comic as a transcultural critic and the comedy set as an act of transcultural criticism of contemporary American culture. I use the framework of transcultural criticism developed by Lewis1 (2002) for the purpose of cultural investigation in Hasan Minhaj’s stand-up comedy Homecoming King (2017). Through the amalgamation of political aesthetics and cultural civics, Lewis’ theorization of transculturalism offers an interesting approach for critical discourse analysis of racial injustice and inequality in Muslim American stand-up comedy. Minhaj uses persuasion games and language wars to highlight the dissonance in the dominant discourse about Islam. His goal is not to be a spokesperson for Muslim Americans but to provide new imaginings to the discussion of race, religion, and belonging in the context of Brown Americans in the post 9/11 era both within and outside the community.

Sustainability Disclosure in Integrated Reporting: Does It Matter to Investors? A Cheap Talk Approach

The purpose of this study is to investigate the value-relevance of corporate sustainability disclosure through integrated reporting. Sustainability disclosure is subject to managers’ discretion. Besides, it is often hardly verifiable. In this respect, integrated reporting could provide the means for a verifiable disclosure, otherwise, in the jargon of game theory, it could be considered as a cheap talk. This paper investigates which of these hypotheses is most likely to occur in reality. In order to do this, a simple theoretical framework is introduced, where sustainability of corporate performances is modelled as a tail-risk for shareholders. Costless signaling games (cheap talk) and persuasion games are reviewed within this context, in order to derive competing theories of sustainability disclosure’s value relevance through integrated reporting. These alternative theories are tested empirically consistent with the theoretical framework presented, in order to identify key-parameters. In this respect, a systematic textual analysis (artificial intelligence) of integrated reports was employed as to build a synthetic measure of sustainability disclosure. The application of this methodology on a sample of European listed companies showed that sustainability disclosure through integrated reporting has no effect on market-valuations, confirming the null hypothesis of integrated reporting resulting in a cheap talk’s babbling equilibrium.