Abstract
We examine how the probability of persuading an audience depends on resources expended by contending parties as well as on other factors. We use a Bayesian approach whereby the audience makes inferences solely based on the evidence produced by the contestants. We find conditions that yield the well-known additive contest success function, including the logit function. We also find conditions that produce a generalized “difference” functional form. In all cases, there are three main determinants of audience choice: (i) the truth and other objective parameters of the environment; (ii) the biases of the audience, and (iii) the resources expended by the interested parties.
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We would like to thank Nejat Anbarci, Hao Jia, R. Duncan Luce, Kalle Moene, Karl Warneryd and two referees for comments or discussions, as well participants in the conference “Advances in the theory of contests and tournaments” at the Social Science Research Council-Berlin (WZB), the 2007 AEA meeting session on “transparency”, and seminar participants at Deakin University, Drexel University, Monash University, UC Irvine, and USC.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Skaperdas, S., Vaidya, S. Persuasion as a contest. Econ Theory 51, 465–486 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00199-009-0497-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00199-009-0497-2