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Thanks. It was purely a theoretical question, just trying to get a better handle on the relative importance of different ranking factors.

We have this problem today. We publish a post, it gets picked up by another site that typically outranks because it is a great blog/site and they outrank us for our own story. They always link back to our original post, but very rarely do they use canonical which would be the preferred method. Theoretically, Google is supposed to know who the original source for the content is and rank accordingly, but I have seen and continue to see the other sites rank higher. However, I do see as time goes by we eventually start to outrank these sites for our posts. As a bonus though they are backlinks to the blog. So in the end, if you are borrowing or syndicating someone else's post, always link back to them as the source, this is best practice and as an example of who does this, news agencies. They will syndicate content from the original on their blog and link back to it. As for the B post linking to the C post, I would think this could backfire as the content on B is duplicate to both C and A but doesn't give the proper credit to A. It may outrank but over time could be penalized for thin or duplicate content.