Effective persuasion
Effective persuasion
Do elementary statistics or equilibrium theory deliver any rules of thumb regarding how we should argue in debates? We suggest a framework for normative analysis of debates. In our framework, each discussant wants the audience to believe that the actual state coincides with the discussant's favorite state. We show that if the discussants' payoff functions in the audience's posterior are concave above the prior, convex below the prior, and exhibit some form of loss aversion, then the discussant who begins the debate should first present weaker arguments rather than stronger arguments, and the discussant who speaks second should respond with weak arguments to weak arguments, and with strong arguments to strong arguments. We derive similar rules of thumb regarding the choice between presenting evidence that is independent of the opponent's evidence versus presenting evidence that is potentially correlated.
persuasion, hard evidence, debate
University of Southampton
Chen, Ying
338aa31f-c129-49c9-b5b7-b583836a8cc1
Olszewski, Wojciech
0eab9777-5915-4aed-b413-b6fafd5b1d11
3 February 2011
Chen, Ying
338aa31f-c129-49c9-b5b7-b583836a8cc1
Olszewski, Wojciech
0eab9777-5915-4aed-b413-b6fafd5b1d11
Chen, Ying and Olszewski, Wojciech
(2011)
Effective persuasion
(Discussion Papers in Economics and Econometrics, 1310)
Southampton, GB.
University of Southampton
40pp.
Record type:
Monograph
(Discussion Paper)
Abstract
Do elementary statistics or equilibrium theory deliver any rules of thumb regarding how we should argue in debates? We suggest a framework for normative analysis of debates. In our framework, each discussant wants the audience to believe that the actual state coincides with the discussant's favorite state. We show that if the discussants' payoff functions in the audience's posterior are concave above the prior, convex below the prior, and exhibit some form of loss aversion, then the discussant who begins the debate should first present weaker arguments rather than stronger arguments, and the discussant who speaks second should respond with weak arguments to weak arguments, and with strong arguments to strong arguments. We derive similar rules of thumb regarding the choice between presenting evidence that is independent of the opponent's evidence versus presenting evidence that is potentially correlated.
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Published date: 3 February 2011
Keywords:
persuasion, hard evidence, debate
Organisations:
Social Sciences
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 353827
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/353827
ISSN: 0966-4246
PURE UUID: 7ad4ca7c-595a-4dd2-8b1c-cc9e2bc28824
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Date deposited: 19 Jun 2013 11:36
Last modified: 14 Mar 2024 14:11
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Contributors
Author:
Ying Chen
Author:
Wojciech Olszewski
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