The Indoctrination Game

Lotem Ikan and David Lagziel

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: The indoctrination game is a complete-information contest over public opinion. The players exert costly effort to manifest their private opinions in public in order to control the discussion, so that the governing opinion is similar to theirs. Our analysis provides a theoretical foundation for the silent majority and vocal minority phenomena, i.e., we show that all moderate opinions remain mute in equilibrium while allowing extremists full control of the discussion. Moreover, we prove that elevated exposure to others' opinions increases the observed polarization among individuals. Using these results, we formulate a new social-learning framework, referred to as an indoctrination process.

Date: 2023-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.02604 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Indoctrination Game (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2305.02604

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().