The Politics of Personalized News Aggregation

Lin Hu, Anqi Li and Ilya Segal

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: We study how personalized news aggregation for rationally inattentive voters (NARI) affects policy polarization and public opinion. In a two-candidate electoral competition model, an attention-maximizing infomediary aggregates source data about candidates' valence into easy-to-digest news. Voters decide whether to consume news, trading off the expected gain from improved expressive voting against the attention cost. NARI generates policy polarization even if candidates are office-motivated. Personalized news aggregation makes extreme voters the disciplining entity of policy polarization, and the skewness of their signals is crucial for sustaining a high degree of policy polarization in equilibrium. Analysis of disciplining voters yields insights into the equilibrium and welfare consequences of regulating infomediaries.

Date: 2019-10, Revised 2022-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-mic, nep-pol and nep-upt
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:1910.11405

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