Positioning knowledge: schools of thought and new knowledge creation – Part 2
By Phin Upham
Positioning
Hotelling (1929) described a competitive game that was later adapted to explore strategic positioning in ideological space. In the game, two hypothetical newspaper sellers, competing for readers who are distributed evenly along ‘‘Main Street,’’ can set up their stand anywhere in town. Assuming that, for the same price, customers will buy the closest newspaper if one newspaper seller were to position himself anywhere but the center of Main Street, the other would position himself a little closer to the center point and gain the majority of the customers. Thus both sellers end up converging at the midpoint of Main Street. In this model each player explicitly takes into consideration the moves of other players when acting. A political variant of this principle was applied to the ideological landscape of voters to explain the middle-of-the-road views generally espoused by candidates of major political parties (Downs 1957). Given an even distribution of voters, politicians in a two-party race, in order to appeal to the greatest number of voters, will converge to mainstream positions where they maximize their access to voters in a Nash equilibrium. More generally, Downs’ work finds that in an intellectual landscape, given Hotelling’s assumptions, a central position closest to the greatest number of consumers is optimal.