Online News Consumption and Limited Consideration

Matthijs Wildenbeest

No 22-10, Working Papers from NET Institute

Abstract: This paper develops a structural model of online news consumption that explicitly takes into account that consumers may not consider all online news sources. Using a unique data set that contains browsing behavior of a large number of individuals as well as survey data that contains their political outlook, we estimate to what extent online news consumption choices are driven by the ideology and quality of online news sources when consideration is limited. We find that estimation of our consideration set model leads to mostly larger estimates of the quality of news sources and better fits joint visiting patterns observed in the data than a full consideration model. These findings have implications for counterfactuals in which the availability of news sources changes, and may lead to different predictions with respect to how these changes affect online segregation.

Keywords: online news; consideration set models; online segregation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C13 D83 L15 L82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2022-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ind and nep-pay
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