Resisting persuasion

In the context of Bayesian Persuasion (Kamenica and Gentzkow, 2011), typically, a biased Sender designs a signal to influence the binary decision of an unbiased Receiver. Can the Re- ceiver improve her payoffs by adopting a resistance strategy, i.e., by committing into incurring (deterministic or stochastic) costs if she picks the Sender-preferred action? We argue that deter- ministic resistance strategies cannot improve the Receiver’s payoffs, whereas stochastic resistance strategies can increase both the informativeness of the signal and the Receiver’s payoffs. We fully characterize the optimal resistance strategy and show that it always induces a substantial increase in the Receiver’s welfare, as well as a perfectly informative signal.