IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ehl/lserod/127777.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Competitive capture of public opinion

Author

Listed:
  • Alonso, Ricardo
  • Padró i Miquel, Gerard

Abstract

Two opposed interested parties (IPs) compete to influence citizens with heterogeneous priors which receive news items produced by a variety of sources. The IPs fight to capture the coverage conveyed in these items. We characterize the equilibrium level of capture of item as well as the equilibrium level of information transmission. Capture increases the prevalence of the ex ante most informative messages and can explain the empirical distribution of slant at the news‐item level. Opposite capturing efforts do not cancel each other and instead undermine social learning as rational citizens discount informative messages. Citizen skepticism makes efforts to capture the news strategic substitutes. Because of strategic substitution, competition for influence is compatible with horizontal differentiation between successful media. In equilibrium, rational citizens choose to consume messages from aligned sources despite knowledge of the bias in a manner consistent with recent empirical evidence.

Suggested Citation

  • Alonso, Ricardo & Padró i Miquel, Gerard, 2025. "Competitive capture of public opinion," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 127777, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:127777
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/127777/
    File Function: Open access version.
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:127777. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: LSERO Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lsepsuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.