Competitive Capture of Public Opinion
研究两个对立利益方如何竞争影响公民舆论，发现捕获行为增加先验最有信息量的消息的流行度，且理性公民会因怀疑而折扣信息，导致社会学习受损。
Two opposed interested parties (IPs) compete to influence citizens with heterogeneous priors which receive news items produced by a variety of sources. The IPs fight to capture the coverage conveyed in these items. We characterize the equilibrium level of capture of item as well as the equilibrium level of information transmission. Capture increases the prevalence of the ex ante most informative messages and can explain the empirical distribution of slant at the news‐item level. Opposite capturing efforts do not cancel each other and instead undermine social learning as rational citizens discount informative messages. Citizen skepticism makes efforts to capture the news strategic substitutes. Because of strategic substitution, competition for influence is compatible with horizontal differentiation between successful media. In equilibrium, rational citizens choose to consume messages from aligned sources despite knowledge of the bias in a manner consistent with recent empirical evidence.