A Model of Competing Narratives
By Kfir Eliaz, Rani Spiegler. The American Economic Review, 2018
139 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We formalize the argument that political disagreements can be traced to a “clash of narratives.” Drawing on the “Bayesian Networks” literature, we represent a narrative by a causal model that maps actions into consequences, weaving a selection of other random variables into the story. Narratives generate beliefs by interpreting long-run correlations between these variables. An equilibrium is defined as a probability distribution over narrative-policy pairs that maximize a representative agent's anticipatory utility, capturing the idea that people are drawn to hopeful narratives. Our equilibrium analysis sheds light on the structure of prevailing narratives, the variables they involve, the policies they sustain, and their contribution to political polarization. (JEL D72, D83, D85, F52)
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1aeb561e028c19e329bafa4e8d229629ade865ff
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Citations in the corpus
- Limit Points of Endogenous Misspecified Learning (2020, background): “7See Gibbons, LiCalzi, and Warglien (2019) and Bell et al. (2019) for organizational economics, Rees-Jones and Taubinsky (2020) and Morrison and Taubinsky (2019) for public economics, and Levy, Razin, and Young (2020) and Eliaz and Spiegler (2018) for political economy.”