Competing for attention : is the showiest also the best?
Abstract
We introduce attention games. Alternatives ranked by quality (producers, politicians, sexual partners...) desire to be chosen and compete for the imperfect attention of a chooser by investing in their own salience. We prove that if alternatives can control the attention they get, then "the showiest is the best": the equilibrium ordering of salience (weakly) reproduces the quality ranking and the best alternative is the one that gets picked most often. This result also holds under more general conditions. However, if those conditions fail, then even the worst alternative can be picked most often.
Citation
Manzini , P & Mariotti , M 2014 ' Competing for attention : is the showiest also the best? ' School of Economics & Finance Discussion Paper , no. 1403 , University of St Andrews , St Andrews .
ISSN
0962-4031Type
Working or discussion paper
Rights
(c) The author 2014
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