Learning from Shared News: When Abundant Information Leads to Belief Polarization

T. Renee Bowen, Danil Dmitriev and Simone Galperti

No 28465, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We study learning via shared news. Each period agents receive the same quantity and quality of first-hand information and can share it with friends. Some friends (possibly few) share selectively, generating heterogeneous news diets across agents akin to echo chambers. Agents are aware of selective sharing and update beliefs by Bayes' rule. Contrary to standard learning results, we show that beliefs can diverge in this environment leading to polarization. This requires that (i) agents hold misperceptions (even minor) about friends' sharing and (ii) information quality is sufficiently low. Polarization can worsen when agents' social connections expand. When the quantity of first-hand information becomes large, agents can hold opposite extreme beliefs resulting in severe polarization. We find that news aggregators can curb polarization caused by news sharing. Our results hold without media bias or fake news, so eliminating these is not sufficient to reduce polarization. When fake news is included, it can lead to polarization but only through misperceived selective sharing. We apply our theory to shed light on the evolution of public opinions about climate change in the US.

JEL-codes: D82 D83 D90 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic and nep-soc
Note: POL
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Published as T Renee Bowen & Danil Dmitriev & Simone Galperti, 2023. "Learning from Shared News: When Abundant Information Leads to Belief Polarization," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol 138(2), pages 955-1000.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w28465.pdf (application/pdf)

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:nbr:nberwo:28465

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w28465

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().