Elections and Market Provision of Information

Christian Bruns

No 4091, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Economists usually think that rational voters have little incentives to acquire costly information. We present a theoretical model to show that, in contrast to this widely held belief, rational voters acquire considerable amounts of information if media technology is available because then they do not condition their informational decisions on being pivotal. The model also shows that the quality of media coverage is inefficiently low because voters have incentives to free-ride. Further, we show how the quality of information depends on the size of the electorate, the prior knowledge of voters and on the technology to produce information.

Keywords: elections; information; media (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D80 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Working Paper: Elections and Market Provision of Information (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_4091

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