Electoral Competition with Fake News / Gene M. Grossman, Elhanan Helpman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Grossman, Gene M.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Helpman, Elhanan.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w26409.

NBER working paper series no. w26409

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2019.

Summary:

Misinformation pervades political competition. We introduce opportunities for political candidates and their media supporters to spread fake news about the policy environment and perhaps about parties' positions into a familiar model of electoral competition. In the baseline model with full information, the parties' positions converge to those that maximize aggregate welfare. When parties can broadcast fake news to audiences that disproportionately include their partisans, policy divergence and suboptimal outcomes can result. We study a sequence of models that impose progressively tighter constraints on false reporting and characterize situations that lead to divergence and a polarized electorate.

Notes:

Print version record

October 2019.