Changing Simplistic Worldviews

Abstract

We study a Bayesian persuasion model with two-dimensional states of the world, in which the sender (she) and receiver (he) have heterogeneous prior beliefs and care about different dimensions. The receiver is a naive agent who has a simplistic worldview: he ignores the dependency between the two dimensions of the state. We provide a characterization for the sender's gain from persuasion both when the receiver is naive and when he is rational. We show that the receiver benefits from having a simplistic worldview if and only if it makes him perceive the states in which his interest is aligned with the sender as less likely.