NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

Competition in Persuasion

Matthew Gentzkow, Emir Kamenica

NBER Working Paper No. 17436
Issued in September 2011
NBER Program(s):   IO   LE   POL

Does competition among persuaders increase the extent of information revealed? We study ex ante symmetric information games where a number of senders choose what information to gather and communicate to a receiver, who takes a non-contractible action that affects the welfare of all players. We characterize the information revealed in pure-strategy equilibria. We consider three ways of increasing competition among senders: (i) moving from collusive to non-cooperative play, (ii) introducing additional senders, and (iii) decreasing the alignment of senders' preferences. For each of these notions, we establish that increasing competition cannot decrease the amount of information revealed, and will in a certain sense tend to increase it.

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