Information Manipulation, Coordination, and Regime Change*
研究政权如何通过宣传操纵信息以影响公民起义决策，发现信号精度高时政权更难被推翻，但信号数量增加时政权更易被推翻，除非信息控制有规模经济。
This article presents a model of information manipulation and political regime change. There is a regime that can be overthrown but only if enough citizens participate in an uprising. Citizens are imperfectly informed about the regime's ability to resist an uprising and the regime can engage in propaganda that, taken at face-value, makes the regime seem stronger than it truly is. This coordination game with endogenous information manipulation has a unique equilibrium and the article gives a complete analytic characterization of the equilibrium's comparative statics. Holding fixed the number of signals available to citizens, if the per-unit signal precision is sufficiently high then the regime is harder to overthrow. In contrast, if the number of signals increases, so that both total signal precision and the regime's costs of manipulation rise together, then the regime is easier to overthrow unless there are strong economies of scale in information control. Copyright 2013, Oxford University Press.