Competing for Attention: Is the Showiest also the Best?

Paola Manzini and Marco Mariotti

No 2014-015, SIRE Discussion Papers from Scottish Institute for Research in Economics (SIRE)

Abstract: We introduce attention games. Alternatives ranked by quality (producers, politicians, sexual partners...) desire to be chosen and compete for the imperfect attention of a chooser by investing in their own salience. We prove that if alternatives can control the attention they get, then the showiest is the best: the equilibrium ordering of salience (weakly) reproduces the quality ranking and the best alternative is the one that gets picked most often. This result also holds under more general conditions. However, if those conditions fail, then even the worst alternative can be picked most often.

Keywords: Consideration sets; bounded rationality; stochastic choice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic
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Journal Article: Competing for Attention: Is the Showiest Also the Best? (2018)
Working Paper: Competing for Attention: Is the Showiest Also the Best? (2015)
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