Media Competition and Social Disagreement

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Perego, Jacopo; Yuksel, Sevgi
• 署名单位: Columbia University; University of California System; University of California Santa Barbara
• 刊物名称: ECONOMETRICA
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0012-9682
• DOI: 10.3982/ECTA16417
• 发表日期: 2022
• 页码: 223-265
• 关键词: electoral competition; spatial competition; newspaper entry; News media; BIAS; polarization; INFORMATION; ELECTIONS; valence; CONSEQUENCES

摘要

We study the competitive provision and endogenous acquisition of political information. Our main result identifies a natural equilibrium channel through which a more competitive market decreases the efficiency of policy outcomes. A critical insight we put forward is that competition among information providers leads to informational specialization: firms provide relatively less information on issues that are of common interest and relatively more information on issues on which agents' preferences are heterogeneous. This enables agents to acquire information about different aspects of the policy, specifically, those that are particularly important to them. This leads to an increase in social disagreement, which has negative welfare implications. We establish that, in large enough societies, competition makes every agent worse off by decreasing the utility that she derives from the policy outcome. Furthermore, we show that this decline cannot be compensated by the decrease in prices resulting from competition.