Strategic Diffusion of Information and Preference Manipulation

This paper bridges the existing gap between the empirical consumer choice literature and the theoretical structures built to account for information manipulation between a sender and a decision maker. The authors define a theoretical structure that allows for the analysis of preference manipulation in multiattribute environments via information multifunctions when the information transmitted is verifiable. A series of examples are provided that illustrate numerically the behaviour and validity of this theoretical structure. A concrete application of this theoretical framework is the possibility for an information sender to induce any predetermined preference relation on a decision maker, and, in particular, how lexicographic preferences can be induced starting from non-lexicographic additive ones.