Technology Category
Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Social Choice / VotingHumans and AI: VotingSearch and Optimization: Adversarial Search
Targeted Advertising in Elections
🤖 AI Summary
This paper investigates how targeted advertising reshapes electoral outcomes, focusing on how challengers leverage private information to persuade ideologically divergent voters. Building upon a one-dimensional spatial voting model and a game-theoretic framework, it formalizes a persuasion mechanism under asymmetric information, wherein the challenger strategically discloses verifiable (but non-committing) signals to achieve precise voter targeting. The analysis yields two key contributions: first, even when the status quo aligns with the median voter’s ideal point, targeted advertising enables the challenger to secure majority support; second, full transparency—i.e., public disclosure of all ad content—improves collective decision quality relative to information suppression. These findings challenge conventional campaign theories that rely on binding commitments or mass communication, offering a novel theoretical foundation for political communication in the digital age and generating policy-relevant insights for regulating algorithmic political advertising.
Technology Category
Application Category
📝 Abstract
How does targeted advertising influence electoral outcomes? This paper presents a one-dimensional spatial model of voting in which a privately informed challenger persuades voters to support him over the status quo. I show that targeted advertising enables the challenger to persuade voters with opposing preferences and swing elections decided by such voters; under simple majority, the challenger can defeat the status quo even when it is located at the median voter's bliss point. Ex-ante commitment power is unnecessary -- the challenger succeeds by strategically revealing different pieces of verifiable information to different voters. Publicizing all political ads would mitigate the negative effects of targeted advertising and help voters collectively make the right choice.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
How targeted advertising influences electoral outcomes in elections
How challengers persuade voters with opposing preferences through advertising
How publicizing political ads mitigates negative effects of targeting
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Targeted advertising enables persuasion of opposing voters
Strategic revelation of verifiable information to different voters
Publicizing all political ads mitigates negative effects
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