Make an Offer They Can’t Refuse: Grounding Bayesian Persuasion in Real-World Dialogues without Pre-Commitment

Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) still struggle with strategic persuasion, largely because existing approaches either neglect information asymmetry or rely on unrealistic precommitment assumptions. We introduce a type induced commitment-communication mechanism that grounds Bayesian Persuasion (BP) in natural language dialogue without precommitment: the persuader narrates their potential types (e.g., honest vs. dishonest) to dynamically construct an information schema, enabling the persuadee to perform Bayesian belief updates within the conversation itself. We implement two variants: Semi-Formal-Natural Language (SFNL) and Fully-Natural-Language(FNL), evaluating them against strong baselines across multiple LLMs and human judges. BP strategies consistently outperform baselines: SFNL excels in logical credibility, while FNL shows superior robustness and emotional resonance. We verify that gains stem from genuine Bayesian reasoning rather than superficial formatting, and we further show that supervised fine-tuning enables small models to match the persuasive performance of much larger ones.
Authors
Buwei He, Yang Liu, Zhaowei Zhang, Zixia Jia, Yang Yu, Huijia Wu, Zhaofeng He✉, Zilong Zheng✉, Yipeng Kang✉
Publication Year
2026
http://eng.bigai.ai/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2026/09/6855_Make_an_Offer_They_Can_t_.pdf
Publication Venue
EMNLP
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