Research / BFI Working PaperJul 23, 2020

Persuasion on Networks

Konstantin Sonin, Georgy Egorov

We analyze persuasion in a model, in which each receiver might buy a direct access to the sender’s signal or to rely on her network connections to get it. For the sender, a higher slant increases the impact per direct receiver, yet diminishes the willingness of agents to receive information. Contrary to naive intuition, the optimal propaganda might target peripheral, rather than centrally-located agents, and is at its maximum levels when the probability that information flows between agents is close to zero or nearly one, but not in-between. The impact of the network density depends on this probability as well.

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