Andreas G. B. Ziegler

This paper examines how to persuade an audience of multiple receivers. Using two laboratory experiments, I investigate whether coordinating the audience’s actions using public signals or relying on private messages to miscoordinate actions is more effective in persuasion, how this depends on the audience’s strategic environment, and which channel information designers actually choose. The results match the theoretical prediction that public persuasion works best when the receivers’ environment features strategic complements. Informational incentives as captured in obedience constraints organize receivers’ responses. However, contrary to theory, public signals are as persuasive as private ones under strategic substitutes. When designing information, senders respond to this pattern by engaging more frequently in public communication, especially when the receivers’ environment features strategic complements, but persuade too aggressively.

Do consumers naively reward corporate value endorsement? In an online market experiment, U.S. consumers buy from sellers who endorse values with varying strategic incentives and costs. Consumers reward value-endorsing sellers but discount endorsements chosen under strategic incentives; surprisingly, costly endorsements do not outperform cheap ones. Consumers’ beliefs appear sophisticated: they anticipate pandering, understand selection, but also expect a larger strategic response when endorsement is costly. A rational-inference benchmark based on consumers’ own beliefs closely approximates observed willingness-to-pay for strategic sellers, consistent with consumers valuing the possibility of genuine alignment even in strategic environment. Open-ended narratives reveal the same mixed-population reasoning outside the experiment: consumers attribute value endorsements to both profit and genuine motives. These findings help explain why cheap value appeals can persist and why costly commitment may fail to help genuinely aligned firms stand out.

The off path plays a key role in theoretical models of strategic interaction, yet, empirically, little is known about choices and beliefs off path. Using a novel experimental paradigm where off-path behaviour is well identified and mistakes are rare, we document three findings. First, participants overestimate mistake probabilities and overreact to payoff differences. Second, although off-path moves strongly predict subsequent deviations, participants underinfer from them when forming beliefs about later choices. Third, underinference is strongest among participants assigning low probability to off-path moves. They are perfection believers: following an off-path move, they continue ruling out subsequent deviations.