The Story of Propaganda: a Theoretical Approach

One agent (called an actor) is making the decision which depending on the state of the world determines the outcome to himself and also another party. The other party (an imposer) is the only one that receives the true signal from nature, and thus truly updates its beliefs regarding the probabilities of different states of the world. An imposer also has the ability to translate the signal for the actor and can alter the signal with some costs. An actor is fully naïve and treats the signal as if it was coming from the nature directly. Thus, one party is altering what the other receives with the other party having no ideas about it – just like in the case of propaganda. The paper proves some intuitive results: the existence of the optimal non-zero level of propaganda in all cases when there is no specific relationship between the preferences of individual; how under a certain condition it is never optimal to alter the spread of the signal that is initially received. After that, it concludes with a solution for a particular case of functions and also looks at evidence, connecting the level of propaganda to the costs of it and to the coefficient of ambiguity.