Date: December 5th, 2024 (12:30 pm – 1:30 pm)

Speaker: Spencer Yongwook Kwon

Paper Title: Persuasion Through Cues

Abstract: We describe and experimentally test a model where an agent facing a complex decision forms beliefs by simulation: sampling scenarios and assessing the utility of the decision only among those that come to mind. Crucially, this sampling is subject to cuing: scenarios similar to the agent’s current context are more easily simulated, and a persuader can manipulate the agent’s beliefs by altering this context. Even objectively uninformative messages simply highlighting known aspects of the problem can be persuasive if they facilitate simulation of otherwise neglected scenarios. Experimentally, participants’ beliefs (both about a random process and about others’ actions in a dictator game) are highly susceptible to such persuasion through simulation. We then apply the model to several economic settings to ask what products, financial assets, and political positions agents can be persuaded to choose. 

Bio: Spencer Yongwook Kwon is an assistant professor of economics at Brown University. His main research interest is to understand how people respond to information, and to explore financial and macroeconomic implications. His work uses a variety of methods, including lab experiments, theoretical modeling, and empirical asset pricing.