Electoral Competition with Fake News

Gene Grossman and Elhanan Helpman
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Gene Grossman: Princeton University

Working Papers from Princeton University. Economics Department.

Abstract: Misinformation pervades political competition. We introduce opportunities for political candidates and their media supporters to spread fake news about the policy environment and perhaps about parties’ positions into a familiar model of electoral competition. In the baseline model with full information, the parties’ positions converge to those that maximize aggregate welfare. When parties can broadcast fake news to audiences that disproportionately include their partisans, policy divergence and suboptimal outcomes can result. We study a sequence of models that impose progressively tighter constraints on false reporting and characterize situations that lead to divergence and a polarized electorate.

Keywords: policy formation; probabilistic voting; misinformation; polarization; fake news (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-cdm, nep-mic and nep-pol
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Downloads: (external link)
https://www.princeton.edu/~grossman/fakenews.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: Electoral competition with fake news (2023)
Working Paper: Electoral Competition with Fake News (2020)
Working Paper: Electoral Competition with Fake News (2019)
Working Paper: Electoral Competition with Fake News (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pri:econom:2020-11

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