Program > Program by speaker > Rubí-Barceló Antoni

We analyze the selection of a public policy by a committee of heterogeneous agents (challengers) who subsequently will confront a group of status-quo defenders in a contest. We study how intra-group heterogeneity among challengers generates forces that affect their policy choice and show how they interact with the inter-group effects of this choice. As a result of this interaction, the policy selected by the challengers can be either more moderated or polarized than what would be selected in the absence of the succeeding struggle. We study this setting under different specifications of the contest success function and alternative rules to internally decide the policy among challengers.