Persuading an inattentive and privately informed receiver

Abstract: This paper studies the persuasion of a receiver who accesses information only if she exerts costly attention effort. A sender designs an experiment to persuade the receiver to take a specific action. The experiment affects the receiver's attention effort, that is, the probability that she updates her beliefs. As a result, persuasion has two margins: extensive (effort) and intensive (action). The receiver's utility exhibits a supermodularity property in information and effort. By leveraging this property, we prove a general equivalence between experiments and persuasion mechanisms `a la Kolotilin et al.\ (2017). In applications, the sender's optimal strategy involves censoring favorable states.