The battle of opinion: dynamic information revelation by ideological senders

Arnold Polanski; Mark Le Quement

doi:10.1007/s00182-022-00826-z

The battle of opinion: dynamic information revelation by ideological senders

Arnold Polanski, Mark Le Quement

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Abstract

Two informed and interested parties (senders) repeatedly send messages to an uninformed party (public). Senders face a trade-off between propagating their favoured opinions, possibly by lying, and maintaining a high audience (or market share), as the state is occasionally revealed and lies cause audiences to switch to the competitor. We fully characterize a focal Markov perfect equilibrium of this game and discuss the impact of exogenous parameters on the truthfulness of equilibrium reporting. In particular, we find that senders’ lying propensities are strategic complements so that increasing one sender’s bias decreases both senders’ truthfulness. We also analyse the role of polarization across senders.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	463-483
Number of pages	21
Journal	International Journal of Game Theory
Volume	52
Issue number	2
Early online date	29 Nov 2022
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/s00182-022-00826-z
Publication status	Published - Jun 2023

Keywords

Communication
Externalities
Information
Polarization

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The battle of opinion: dynamic information revelation by ideological senders

Abstract

Keywords

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