arXiv subjects

Philipp Denter

Publications and source records attributed to Philipp Denter.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Strategic Pricing and Consumer Welfare under One-Sided Price Regulation

Motivated by Germany's April 2026 fuel price regulation, in this note I study a two-period pricing problem with demand uncertainty and a rule that prohibits more than one price increase during the day. Under flexible pricing, the firm chooses the static monopoly price in each period. Under the regulation, by contrast, it may price strategically high in period 1 to preserve flexibility in period 2. I show that the regulation weakly raises expected average prices. The increase is strict when future high demand is sufficiently likely and the gap between high and low demand is large; otherwise, expected average prices are unchanged. Consumer surplus rises when expected prices do not, and decreases otherwise.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2025

Does Ideological Polarization Lead to Policy Polarization?

I study electoral competition between two ideologically polarized parties that are both office- and policy-motivated. Parties have fixed and opposing ideological positions but compete by choosing platforms on a second, continuous policy dimension. The analysis uncovers a non-monotonic relationship between ideological and policy polarization. When ideological polarization is low, an increase leads to policy moderation; when it is high, the opposite occurs, and policies become more extreme. Moreover, an electoral advantage shifts both parties' platforms toward the advantaged party's preferred policy, implying that the advantaged party adopts the more extreme position. More generally, both high- and low-valence candidates may adopt more extreme policies, depending on the electorate's degree of ideological polarization.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2024

Troll Farms

We study how coordinated disinformation campaigns affect elections. We develop a constrained information design model in which a sender deploys uninformative messages that mimic voters' exogenous informative signals. Voters initially opposed to the sender's preferred outcome receive favourable messages, while those in favour are targeted with unfavourable messages to dilute adverse information. The sender's ability to manipulate political outcomes increases with greater precision of voters' independent signals, but decreases with polarisation. When messaging is costly, the sender may stop targeting marginally opposing voters while moderating message extremism among supporters.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2024

Motivated Reasoning and the Political Economy of Climate Change Inaction

We study how motivated reasoning affects the provision of climate policy in an electoral competition framework. Voters experience anticipatory disutility when future outcomes appear grim and may therefore distort beliefs in response to adverse information. We develop a game-theoretic model in which voters and politicians receive signals about the severity of climate change. When the anticipated welfare losses from severe climate change are sufficiently large, voters optimally ignore unfavorable information, inducing politicians to campaign on policies appropriate for mild climate change only. When welfare losses are moderate, the model admits a second, efficient equilibrium in which voters trust politicians to implement welfare-maximizing policies and vote informatively, thereby creating incentives for politicians to propose adequate climate policy. The model shows how motivated belief formation and voters' expectations about policy responsiveness jointly determine equilibrium selection between effective climate policy and persistent political inaction.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2024

Truth, Lies, and Social Ties: When Image Concerns Fuel Fake News

We study how social image concerns shape information sharing among peers. Individuals receive a signal about a binary state of the world characterized by both a direction and a veracity status. While the direction is freely observable, verifying veracity is costly and depends on individual type. We consider two distinct social image motives: a desire to appear competent and a desire to signal one's worldview. For each motive, we characterize equilibrium sharing behavior and derive implications for the quality of shared information. We identify conditions under which false news is shared more frequently than factual news (e.g., Vosoughi et al., 2018). Both competence- and worldview-based motives can rationalize such patterns, though they yield empirically distinct sharing behaviors and different welfare implications. Finally, we derive testable predictions for each motive and discuss how these align with existing empirical evidence.

econ.TH↗