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News media and delegated information choice

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  • Nimark, Kristoffer P.
  • Pitschner, Stefan

Abstract

No agent has the resources to monitor all events that are potentially relevant for his decisions. Therefore, many delegate their information choice to specialized news providers that monitor the world on their behalf and report only a curated selection of events. We document empirically that, while different outlets typically emphasize different topics, major events shift the general news focus and make coverage more homogeneous. We propose a theoretical framework that formalizes this type of state-dependent editorial behavior by introducing news selection functions. We prove that (i) agents can always reduce the entropy of their posterior beliefs by delegating their information choice, (ii) state-dependent reporting conveys information not only via the contents of a story, but also via the decision of what to report, and (iii) an event that is reported by all news providers is common knowledge among agents only if it is also considered maximally newsworthy by all providers. As an application, we embed delegated news selection into a simple beauty-contest model to demonstrate how it affects actions in a setting with strategic interactions.

Suggested Citation

  • Nimark, Kristoffer P. & Pitschner, Stefan, 2019. "News media and delegated information choice," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 181(C), pages 160-196.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jetheo:v:181:y:2019:i:c:p:160-196
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2019.02.001
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    3. Ryan Chahrour & Kristoffer Nimark & Stefan Pitschner, 2021. "Sectoral Media Focus and Aggregate Fluctuations," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 111(12), pages 3872-3922, December.
    4. Bertsch, Christoph & Hull, Isaiah & Zhang, Xin, 2021. "Narrative fragmentation and the business cycle," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 201(C).
    5. Vegard Høghaug Larsen & Leif Anders Thorsrud, 2022. "Asset returns, news topics, and media effects," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 124(3), pages 838-868, July.
    6. Luca Gambetti & Nicolò Maffei-Faccioli & Sarah Zoi, 2022. "Bad News, Good News: Coverage and Response Asymmetries," Working Paper 2022/8, Norges Bank.
    7. Yuting Chen & Don Bredin & Valerio Potì & Roman Matkovskyy, 2022. "COVID risk narratives: a computational linguistic approach to the econometric identification of narrative risk during a pandemic," Digital Finance, Springer, vol. 4(1), pages 17-61, March.
    8. Diana Gabrielyan & Lenno Uusküla, 2022. "Inflation Expectations And Consumption With Machine Learning," University of Tartu - Faculty of Economics and Business Administration Working Paper Series 142, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, University of Tartu (Estonia).
    9. Jon Ellingsen & Vegard H. Larsen & Leif Anders Thorsrud, 2020. "News Media vs. FRED-MD for Macroeconomic Forecasting," CESifo Working Paper Series 8639, CESifo.
    10. Larsen, Vegard H. & Thorsrud, Leif Anders & Zhulanova, Julia, 2021. "News-driven inflation expectations and information rigidities," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 117(C), pages 507-520.
    11. Petrova, Diana & Trunin, Pavel, 2020. "Revealing the mood of economic agents based on search queries," Applied Econometrics, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), vol. 59, pages 71-87.
    12. Zheng, Hannan & Schwenkler, Gustavo, 2020. "The network of firms implied by the news," ESRB Working Paper Series 108, European Systemic Risk Board.
    13. Jon Ellingsen & Vegard H. Larsen & Leif Anders Thorsrud, 2022. "News media versus FRED‐MD for macroeconomic forecasting," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 37(1), pages 63-81, January.
    14. Saskia Ter Ellen & Vegard H. Larsen & Leif Anders Thorsrud, 2022. "Narrative Monetary Policy Surprises and the Media," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 54(5), pages 1525-1549, August.
    15. Sevgi Yuksel, 2022. "Specialized Learning And Political Polarization," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 63(1), pages 457-474, February.
    16. Lee, Seungpeel & Kim, Jina & Kim, Dongjae & Kim, Ki Joon & Park, Eunil, 2023. "Computational approaches to developing the implicit media bias dataset: Assessing political orientations of nonpolitical news articles," Applied Mathematics and Computation, Elsevier, vol. 458(C).
    17. Felix Kapfhammer & Vegard H. Larsen & Leif Anders Thorsrud, 2020. "Climate risk and commodity currencies," Working Paper 2020/18, Norges Bank.
    18. Szymon Sacher & Laura Battaglia & Stephen Hansen, 2021. "Hamiltonian Monte Carlo for Regression with High-Dimensional Categorical Data," Papers 2107.08112, arXiv.org, revised Feb 2024.
    19. Martineau, Charles & Mondria, Jordi, 2022. "News Selection and Asset Pricing Implications," SocArXiv ame2f, Center for Open Science.
    20. Andres Algaba & David Ardia & Keven Bluteau & Samuel Borms & Kris Boudt, 2020. "Econometrics Meets Sentiment: An Overview Of Methodology And Applications," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 34(3), pages 512-547, July.
    21. Ashwin,Julian & Rao,Vijayendra & Biradavolu,Monica Rao & Chhabra,Aditya & Haque,Arshia & Khan,Afsana Iffat & Krishnan,Nandini, 2022. "A Method to Scale-Up Interpretative Qualitative Analysis, with an Application toAspirations in Cox’s Bazaar, Bangladesh," Policy Research Working Paper Series 10046, The World Bank.
    22. Jacopo Perego & Sevgi Yuksel, 2022. "Media Competition and Social Disagreement," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 90(1), pages 223-265, January.
    23. Perico Ortiz, Daniel, 2023. "Inflation news coverage, expectations and risk premium," FAU Discussion Papers in Economics 05/2023, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Institute for Economics.
    24. Bernd Süssmuth, 2022. "The mutual predictability of Bitcoin and web search dynamics," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 41(3), pages 435-454, April.
    25. Yamaguchi, Yohei, 2022. "Issue selection, media competition, and polarization of salience," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 136(C), pages 197-225.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    News media; Delegated information choice; Latent Dirichlet allocation; Common knowledge; Strategic games; Beauty contest;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
    • D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness

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