Persuading an inattentive and privately informed receiver

Abstract

I study the persuasion of a receiver who accesses information only if she exerts costly attention effort. The sender designs an experiment to persuade the receiver to take a specific action. The experiment also affects the receiver's attention effort, that is, the probability that she updates her beliefs. As a result, persuasion has two margins: extensive (effort) and intensive (action). The receiver's utility exhibits a supermodularity property in information and effort. By leveraging this property, I prove a general equivalence between experiments and persuasion mechanisms \`a la Kolotilin et al. (2017). Censoring high states is an optimal strategy for the sender in applications.