Persuasion as a contest
By Stergios Skaperdas, Samarth Vaidya. Economic Theory, 2008
124 citations recorded by the source corpus.
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.
Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research, Safety Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fd002584e967669328d43ad489b19ac25def8124
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In Management Science and Operations Research
In Safety Research
Citations in the corpus
- Contest functions : theoretical foundations and issues in estimation (2013, background): “Skaperdas and Vaidya (2009) show how the contest functions representing win probabilities can be justified as natural outcomes of an audience's Bayesian inference process in a trial setting involving a plaintiff (P), a defendant (D) and a judge.9 While their model uses a judicial setting, the…”