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News media and delegated information choice

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  • Nimark, Kristoffer P.
  • Pitschner, Stefan

Abstract

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Nimark, Kristoffer P. & Pitschner, Stefan, 2019. "News media and delegated information choice," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 181(C), pages 160-196.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jetheo:v:181:y:2019:i:c:p:160-196
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2019.02.001
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    News media; Delegated information choice; Latent Dirichlet allocation; Common knowledge; Strategic games; Beauty contest;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
    • D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness

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