Keeping the Peace while Getting Your Way: Information, Persuasion and Intimate Partner Violence

We study the effect on intimate partner violence (IPV) of new information received by women only, men only, or both, relevant to a high-stakes household decision made under incomplete information. We model strategic communication of new information between spouses as Bayesian persuasion and develop a theoretical framework for IPV where abuse arises from spousal disagreements. Our framework offers the novel prediction that new information when received by only one spouse may lead to lower IPV incidence as compared to when received by both spouses as a privately informed spouse will seek to forge agreement through strategic communication (“persuasion”), reducing conflict. To test the model’s predictions we leverage an existing randomized controlled trial of an edutainment intervention addressing child marriage decisions in rural Pakistan, targeted at men, women, or both. Our empirical findings confirm the prediction that the likelihood of IPV is highest when men and women are jointly targeted. Due to systematic gender differences in preferences, our model further predicts that marriage delays are largest when targeting men alone or jointly with women and smallest when targeting women alone, predictions that are also confirmed in the data.