February 21, 2025, Webb Hall 1100

Control strategies that rely on shaping the information available to a decision-maker have become popular recently in robotics, engineering, computer science and information economics. The canonical model for such strategic information transmission is known as Bayesian Persuasion and was introduced in the latter field in 2016 by Kamenica and Gentzkow. As the name suggests, this setting assumes that the decision-maker whose information set is influenced acts fully rationally, and according to Bayes rule, upon receiving messages from the sender/controller/influencer. This assumption not only delineates the kind of situations captured by the model but is also, as it turns out, central to its tractability. Indeed, Bayes' rule and the fact that the decision-maker acts optimally make two sets of tools -- the so-called "concavification procedure" and the "revelation principle"-- available to reformulate the sender's problem in an attractive form. This talk investigates what happens to these approaches (both the validity of the concavification and the revelation principle, and the result of their application when they do hold in some sense) when the receiver cannot be assumed to be Bayesian anymore. In particular, we highlight the contributions of control, information and robust optimization theoretic viewpoints in this context. Most of this work is joint with Olivier Massicot.

Cedric Langbort is a Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC), where he is also affiliated with the Decision & Control Group at the Coordinated Science Lab (CSL), and the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (0 % appointment). He works on applications of control, game, and optimization theory to a variety of fields and co- founded and co-directed the Center for People & Infrastructures at CSL. His and his advisees’ work have garnered multiple recognitions such as a NSF CAREER Award, a Siebel Energy Institute Research Award, an IEEE CDC Best Student Paper Award and a NDSEG fellowship.