Strategic Diffusion of Information and Preference Manipulation

The current paper is aimed at bridging 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. We define a theoretical structure that allows for the analysis of preference manipulation in multiattribute environments via information multifunctions when the information transmitted is verifiable. We provide a series of examples that illustrate numerically the behaviour and validity of this theoretical structure. As a concrete application of our theoretical framework we show how it is possible 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