Dynamic Competition for Attention

Abstract

This paper studies information transmission from multiple senders who compete for the attention of a decision maker. Each sender is partially informed about the state of the world and decides how to reveal her information over time to maximise attention. A decision maker wants to learn about the state but faces an attention cost. We derive a condition on the informational environment and the decision problem that guarantees that all information from the senders can be transmitted to the decision maker in equilibrium. A simple class of information processes implements full transmission across general environments. The attention each sender receives is proportional to the residual value of her information. In the case of conditionally iid-informed senders, in the limit as the number of senders grows large, the receiver learns the state exactly and immediately (at no attention cost).