Presenting “Narrative adoption and strategic timing of disclosure?” at 16:00-17:30 online: Click here to join the meeting

On 23 February 2022, we have Maya Jalloul of Lebanese American University visiting us. She is going to give a seminar on “Narrative adoption and strategic timing of disclosure.” at 16:00 online Click here to join the meeting. Please help the organisers by registering in advance at egervari.zsuzsanna@gtk.bme.hu Registration is free. Event can only be attended with vaccination card.

Abstract: This paper investigates a model with two strategic politicians, a proponent and an opponent, and a group of non-strategic voters. The proponent, who is the first mover, has a narrative that she aims to convey to the voters; whereas the opponent’s objective is to divert the voters away from it. The strategic decision of the proponent is when to disclose her narrative with the objective to maximise the adoption of this narrative by a deadline, and that of the opponent is when to disclose the refutation. The voters opinions updating rule follows an average-based De Groot learning concept where a voter splits his attention between the two politicians, his own opinion and his neighbours. We show that once the proponent discloses her narrative, it is optimal for the opponent to disclose her refutation, and that the proponent faces a trade-off between early and late disclosure. We determine the optimal timing of disclosure for the cases of one voter and a group of voters and we examine connections among voters over a specific set of networks, while considering two types of voters, supporters and non-supporters. We also investigate the impact of homophily on timing of disclosure and we find that with higher homophily, the narrative adoption of the supporter is higher and that of the non-supporter is lower.

Presenting “Can Media Pluralism Be Harmful to News Quality?” at 16:00-17:30 QA 406

On 22 February 2022, we have Chistopher P. Stapenhurst of University of Edinburgh visiting us. He is going to give a seminar on “Lemons by design: sowing secrets that curb corruption” (with Andrew Clausen) at 16:00 in room QA406. Please help the organisers by registering in advance at egervari.zsuzsanna@gtk.bme.hu Registration is free. Event can only be attended with vaccination card.

Abstract: We study a problem in which a polluting firm can bribe an inspector to conceal evidence of illegal behaviour. We find that the best way to deter bribes involves paying secret rewards and sending secret clues. The regulator promises to pay a secret reward to either the firm or the inspector when evidence is reported; it then gives them different clues about who will be rewarded. These clues are carefully constructed to engineer the worst possible lemons problem in the market for concealment: each player only wants to conceal evidence if they believe that the other player is more optimistic about being rewarded. But they cannot both be more optimistic in equilibrium, so no concealment takes place. As well as deterring bribes cheaply, this scheme demonstrates the full extent of contagious adverse selection in a bilateral trade environment.