Ideological screening with content provision

Alice Peng-Ju Su ()
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Alice Peng-Ju Su: National Taipei University, Department of Economics

Theory and Decision, 2025, vol. 99, issue 4, No 5, 828 pages

Abstract: Abstract I recognize informational content as an endogenous presentation of evidence from a content provider to a unit mass of receivers with heterogeneous ideology. Through a content-providing contract, the provider screens the receiver’s ideology with some content of various stances and credibility, which then shapes the posterior belief of the receiver. The characteristics of the optimal content provision depend on whether the receiver regards his ideology and the content as information substitutes or information complements. Content provision exhibits a screening property if they are regarded as information substitutes due to the tradeoff between affirmation and rent extraction. If they are considered information complements, content provision exhibits a bang-bang property due to the inconsistency between marginal value and willingness to pay for content. A tractable content-providing contract assuming a Bayesian receiver is examined. A receiver with a stronger ideology is induced to take a weakly less credible content of the same stance. As a corollary, the posterior belief exhibits polarization across stances but convergence within.

Keywords: Ideological screening; Informational content; Freemium; Belief polarization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1007/s11238-025-10071-x

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