Mengxi Sun
Hello!
I am an ABD Ph.D. candidate in Economics at the University of Pittsburgh. My research lies at the intersection of information economics, behavioral economics, and game theory, with a focus on how limitations in knowledge and control over the information environment shape communication and learning.
I will join Tsinghua University as a postdoctoral researcher under the supervision of Dr. Zhen Zhou.
Working Paper
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JMP PDF
Abstract
This paper studies a behavioral model of persuasion where the receiver may misinterpret information designed by the sender. Instead of assuming perfect observation, we allow the receiver to confuse one message for another with some probability. This misinterpretation limits the sender’s ability to influence beliefs and disrupts the standard concavification method of Kamenica and Gentzkow (2011). We also study a second departure in non-Bayesian updating: naïveté, where the receiver fails to account for misinterpretation. Misinterpretation weakly harms the sender without affecting the receiver, but naïveté can benefit the sender at the receiver’s expense. In a binary example, we illustrate how misinterpretation reduces the sender’s optimal payoffs, and when naïveté lowers the receiver’s demand for information. We then extend the analysis to confirmation bias, where misinterpretation depends endogenously on beliefs and strategy. Our analysis complements prior work on non-Bayesian inference (de Clippel and Zhang, 2022) and symmetric noise (Tsakas and Tsakas, 2021), by focusing on structured misunderstanding in persuasion.
Work in progress
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Credibility vs. Contextdraft available upon request
Abstract
This paper develops a unified framework of a sender-receiver communication game that integrates cheap talk messages and narratives that propose data-generating processes explaining observed outcomes, as in Schwartzstein and Sunderam (2021). The central object is the receiver's inferential rule, which maps language (either a message or a narrative) into mental models of the information environment. We show that the distinct predictions of cheap talk and narrative persuasion arise from different assumptions about these inferential rules. We axiomatize such rules and establish a representation theorem that characterizes how two modes of reasoning, the rationality paradigm and the narrative paradigm, coexist in varying degrees and jointly shape equilibrium outcomes. The framework accommodates a rich set of equilibria, explaining susceptibility to misleading narratives without assuming any preference for them. A key implication is that even a rational receiver in the cheap-talk setting may be vulnerable to persuasion through narratives, and that equilibrium use of messages versus narratives need not vary monotonically with the sender's motives.
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Learning from Other Worldviews