News media and delegated information choice

No agent has the resources to monitor all events that are potentially relevant for his decisions. Therefore, many delegate their information choice to specialized news providers that monitor the world on their behalf and report only a curated selection of events. We document empirically that, while...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Nimark, K.P (Author), Pitschner, S. (Author)
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Academic Press Inc. 2019
Subjects:
Online Access:View Fulltext in Publisher
LEADER 01863nam a2200217Ia 4500
001 10.1016-j.jet.2019.02.001
008 220511s2019 CNT 000 0 und d
020 |a 00220531 (ISSN) 
245 1 0 |a News media and delegated information choice 
260 0 |b Academic Press Inc.  |c 2019 
856 |z View Fulltext in Publisher  |u https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jet.2019.02.001 
520 3 |a No agent has the resources to monitor all events that are potentially relevant for his decisions. Therefore, many delegate their information choice to specialized news providers that monitor the world on their behalf and report only a curated selection of events. We document empirically that, while different outlets typically emphasize different topics, major events shift the general news focus and make coverage more homogeneous. We propose a theoretical framework that formalizes this type of state-dependent editorial behavior by introducing news selection functions. We prove that (i) agents can always reduce the entropy of their posterior beliefs by delegating their information choice, (ii) state-dependent reporting conveys information not only via the contents of a story, but also via the decision of what to report, and (iii) an event that is reported by all news providers is common knowledge among agents only if it is also considered maximally newsworthy by all providers. As an application, we embed delegated news selection into a simple beauty-contest model to demonstrate how it affects actions in a setting with strategic interactions. © 2019 The Author(s) 
650 0 4 |a Beauty contest 
650 0 4 |a Common knowledge 
650 0 4 |a Delegated information choice 
650 0 4 |a Latent Dirichlet allocation 
650 0 4 |a News media 
650 0 4 |a Strategic games 
700 1 |a Nimark, K.P.  |e author 
700 1 |a Pitschner, S.  |e author 
773 |t Journal of Economic Theory