EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Why Echo Chambers are Useful

Ole Jann and Christoph Schottmuller

No 857, Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics

Abstract: Why do people appear to forgo information by sorting into “echo chambers†? We construct a highly tractable multi-sender, multi-receiver cheap talk game in which players choose with whom to communicate. We show that segregation into small, homogeneous groups can improve everybody’s information and generate Pareto-improvements. Polarized preferences create a need for segregation; uncertainty about preferences magnifies this need. Using data from Twitter, we show several behavioral patterns that are consistent with the results of our model.

Keywords: Asymmetric Information; Echo Chambers; Polarization; Debate; Cheap Talk; Information Aggregation; Twitter (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D82 D83 D85 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-10-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:24db4d42-f9e6-4859-a7e5-438d11fcc808 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oxf:wpaper:857

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anne Pouliquen ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).

 
Page updated 2025-07-19
Handle: RePEc:oxf:wpaper:857