|
EconStor >
ifo Institut – Leibniz-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung an der Universität München >
CESifo Working Papers, CESifo Group Munich >
Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
http://hdl.handle.net/10419/26204
|
| | |
| Title: | | Persuasion as a contest  |
| Authors: | | Skaperdas, Stergios Vaidya, Samarth |
| Issue Date: | | 2007 |
| Series/Report no.: | | CESifo working paper 2160 |
| Abstract: | | From marketing and advertising to political campaigning and court proceedings, contending parties expend resources to persuade an audience of the correctness of their view. We examine how the probability of persuading the audience depends on the resources expended by the parties, so that persuasion can be modelled as a contest. We use a Bayesian approach whereby the audience makes inferences solely based on the evidence presented to them. The evidence is produced by the resources expended by the contending parties. We find conditions on evidence production and likelihood functions that yield the well-known additive contest success functions, including the logit function as well as the one used in all-pay auctions. We also find conditions that produce a difference functional form. In all cases, there are three main determinants of which side the audience chooses: (i) the truth and other objective parameters of the environment; (ii) the biases of the audience as distilled in their priors and the likelihood function employed ; and (iii) the resources expended by the parties interested in persuading the audience. |
| Subjects: | | rent-seeking advertising litigation political campaigning property rights |
| JEL: | | C70 D20 D70 |
| Document Type: | | Working Paper |
| Appears in Collections: | | CESifo Working Papers, CESifo Group Munich
|
| Files in This Item:
| |
|
| No. of Downloads:
| |
| last Month |
last 3 Month |
total |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| | |
Download bibliographical data as:
BibTeX
|
| |
Share on:http://hdl.handle.net/10419/26204
|
Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.
|