Strategic Persuasion and the Manipulation of Knowledge Structures in Social Choice

University Of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Minneapolis MN

Investigators

Abstract

For the past twenty years, theories of social choice have emphasized the important effects of institutions. However, the cognitive structures with which individuals represent a decision context are also important. These mental models, or knowledge structures, create categories and relationships among alternatives, thereby influencing the existence and characteristics of an equilibrium. In previous papers it was shown that in both cooperative games such as social choice and non-cooperative games such as coordination problems, the prospects for stability are greatly improved when players have shared mental representations (despite having conflicting preferences). These results are broadly referred to as a "knowledge-induced equilibrium." Although a knowledge-induced equilibrium is immune to manipulation by insincere voting, the more interesting question is the extent to which players can manipulate others' mental representations--such as through framing, discourse, or persuasion--in order to influence the collective outcome. This "second-order" strategic behavior is much closer to William Riker's concept of heresthetics. The task of this project is to explore the possibilities and characteristics of manipulation in the knowledge-induced equilibrium framework. More specifically, the investigator constructs a game model where players can send signals to a subset of other players to which they are persuasive in an attempt to alter the mental representations of the decision context and thereby altering the collective outcome. Players' strategies include heresthetical tactics such as arguing relationships among alternatives, adding or removing alternatives from the choice set, and influencing the distribution and depth of other players' knowledge representations. Results from the project contribute to several topics, including (1) explanations of the endogenous emergence of shared knowledge structures through strategic dialogue, (2) the identification of structural positions or contexts that are "lever points" in that a player has disproportionate ability to direct the outcome through strategic persuasion, (3) a formalization of a set of heresthetical maneuvers along the lines called for by Riker, (4) applications to bargaining and negotiation theory, and (5) the development of an alternative index of power based on equilibrium opportunities for strategic persuasion rather than on the combinatorics of coalitions.