Competition in persuasion

Does competition among persuaders increase the extent of information revealed? We study ex ante symmetric information games where a number of senders choose what information to gather and communicate to a receiver, who takes a non-contractible action that affects the welfare of all players. We characterize the information revealed in pure-strategy equilibria. We consider three ways of increasing competition among senders: (i) moving from collusive to non-cooperative play, (ii) introducing additional senders, and (iii) decreasing the alignment of senders ’ preferences. For each of these notions, we establish that increasing competition cannot decrease the amount of information revealed, and in a certain sense tends to increase it. JEL classification: D8