Strategic Information Transmission through the Media

Hanjoon Jung ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: We model media manipulation in which a sender or senders manipulate information through the media to influence receivers. We show that if there is only one sender who has a conditional preference for maintaining its credibility in reporting accurate information and if the receivers face a coordination situation without information about their opponents' types, the sender could influence the receivers to make decisions according to the sender's primary preference by manipulating the information through the media, which makes the report common knowledge. This is true even when the sender and the receivers have contradictory primary preferences. This result extends to the cases in which the sender has imperfect information or in which the sender's primary preference is to maintain its credibility. In the case of multiple senders, however, when there is enough competition among the senders or when simultaneous reporting takes place, the receivers could play their favored outcome against senders' preferences, which sheds light on a solution to the media manipulation problem.

Keywords: Arms Race; Common Knowledge; Information Transmission; Media Bias; Media Competition; Media Manipulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D82 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-08, Revised 2007-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ict and nep-knm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/5556/1/MPRA_paper_5556.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/7188/3/MPRA_paper_7188.pdf revised version (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:pra:mprapa:5556

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().