Model Persuasion - Publications - Faculty & Research

January 2023
Article

The Dark Side of Machiavellian Rhetoric: Signaling in Reward-Based Crowdfunding Performance

By: Goran Calic, Rene Arseneault and Maryam Ghasemaghaei

In this study, we explore the impact of Machiavellian rhetoric on fundraising within the increasingly important context of online crowdfunding. The “all-or-nothing” funding model used by the world’s largest crowdfunding platform, Kickstarter, may be an attractive... View Details

Keywords: Crowdfunding; Communication Strategy; Entrepreneurial Finance; Behavior

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January 2021
Article

Using Models to Persuade

By: Joshua Schwartzstein and Adi Sunderam

We present a framework where "model persuaders" influence receivers’ beliefs by proposing models that organize past data to make predictions. Receivers are assumed to find models more compelling when they better explain the data, fixing receivers’ prior beliefs. Model... View Details

Keywords: Model Persuasion; Analytics and Data Science; Forecasting and Prediction; Mathematical Methods; Framework

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Article

Coarse Thinking and Persuasion

By: Sendhil Mullainathan, Joshua Schwartzstein and Andrei Shleifer

We present a model of uninformative persuasion in which individuals "think coarsely": they group situations into categories and apply the same model of inference to all situations within a category. Coarse thinking exhibits two features that persuaders take advantage... View Details

Keywords: Cognition and Thinking; Brands and Branding