Campaign allocations under probabilistic voting

Abstract

Campaign allocations, Probabilistic voting, D72,

Politics in the Facebook Era - Evidence from the 2016 US Presidential Elections

“…Johnston, Hagen and Jamieson (2004) and Shaw (2006) found that in the 2000 and 2004 US presidential elections, both parties concentrated their campaign visits and television ads on the same set of battleground states. Fletcher and Slutsky (2011) show that parties target the media markets that contain the most persuadable voters. Ridout et al Allcott and Gentzkow (2017) show that social media was an important source of information during the 2016 US presidential elections campaign and that most American adults were exposed to at least one piece of fake information on the Internet.…”

“…In this state, there is only a generic, non-political, advertiser G, whose demand for ads (per consumer) is p G (q). 12 In this state, the equilibrium (denoted with subscript 0) is such that q 0 G = q. State E, instead, captures a situation when elections approach and political candidates look to reach voters.…”

“…Furthermore, although the total quantity of ads (per consumer) remains equal to q, ads that would otherwise be allocated to the generic advertiser are allocated to the political 11 We assume demand by advertisers is large enough to saturate the reservation quantity of ads. 12 We assume that p G (q) < 0, as the marginal value of an impression on a consumer is decreasing. For example, assuming advertising is informative, the more an ad is shown to a consumer, the higher the probability the consumer is already aware of its content.…”

Targeting Political Advertising on Television

“…Johnston, Hagen and Jamieson (2004) and Shaw (2006) detailed the geographic concentration of campaign resources in presidential elections and found that in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, both parties concentrated their campaign visits and television ads on the same set of battleground states. Fletcher and Slutsky (2011) developed a model of targeting political advertising across multiple districts. They argued that the parties will target the media markets that contain the most persuadable voters and used the WAP data to provide evidence that parties do in fact use this strategy.…”