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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.
Original language | English |
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Place of Publication | St Andrews |
Publisher | University of St Andrews |
Number of pages | 27 |
Publication status | Published - Apr 2014 |
Publication series
Name | School of Economics & Finance Discussion Paper |
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Publisher | University of St Andrews |
No. | 1403 |
ISSN (Print) | 0962-4031 |
ISSN (Electronic) | 2055-303X |
Keywords
- Consideration sets
- Bounded rationality
- Stochastic choice
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Dive into the research topics of 'Competing for attention: is the showiest also the best?'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Projects
- 1 Finished
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Formal Models of Bounded Rationality: Formal Models of Bounded Rationality
Mariotti, M. (PI) & Manzini, P. (CoI)
Economic & Social Research Council
5/11/09 → 4/11/10
Project: Standard