Timing Truth Can Persuade: New Paper Shows How Update Rates Manipulate Decisions

A new paper on arXiv (2607.15939) by Ahmet Bugra Gundogan and Melih Bastopcu explores how controlling the timing of information can be a powerful persuasion tool. The authors model a dynamic communication game where a sender controls the rate at which truthful updates are sent from a binary continuous-time Markov source (states 0 and 1). The receiver chooses between a zero-order-hold estimator that follows the sender's updates or a prior-only default estimator, aiming to maximize a weighted correct-estimation utility. The sender, however, wants the receiver's estimate to always be state 1, regardless of the true state. This creates a Stackelberg game: the sender commits to state-dependent Poisson update rates, and the receiver decides whether to follow.

The key finding: for a single source, the optimal sender policy allocates a minimum update intensity to the undesired state (state 0) — just enough to satisfy a participation constraint that ensures the receiver's average utility doesn't drop below its prior — and devotes the remaining budget to the desired state (state 1). This shows that controlling timeliness alone can persuade the receiver and increase the sender's utility without lying or distorting information. For multiple sources with heterogeneous minimum update intensities, a branch-and-bound algorithm efficiently finds the optimal solution without exhaustive search. The results also extend to multiple receivers over dedicated channels, suggesting broad applicability in recommendation systems, advertising, or any scenario where information arrival timing can be gated.