IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/econjl/v131y2021i637p2033-2057..html

Social Connectivity, Media Bias, and Correlation Neglect

Author

Listed:
  • Philipp Denter
  • Martin Dumav
  • Boris Ginzburg

Abstract

A biased newspaper aims to persuade voters to vote for the government. Voters are uncertain about the government’s competence. Each voter receives the newspaper’s report as well as independent private signals about the competence. Voters then exchange messages containing this information on social media and form posterior beliefs, neglecting correlation among messages. We show that greater social connectivity increases the probability of an efficient voting outcome if the prior favours the government; otherwise, efficiency decreases. The probability of an efficient outcome remains strictly below one even when connectivity becomes large, implying a failure of the Condorcet jury theorem.

Suggested Citation

  • Philipp Denter & Martin Dumav & Boris Ginzburg, 2021. "Social Connectivity, Media Bias, and Correlation Neglect," The Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 131(637), pages 2033-2057.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:econjl:v:131:y:2021:i:637:p:2033-2057.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ej/ueaa128
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Boris Ginzburg, 2023. "Slacktivism," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 35(2), pages 126-143, April.
    2. Denter, Philipp & Ginzburg, Boris, 2021. "Troll Farms and Voter Disinformation," MPRA Paper 109634, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. Denter, Philipp, 2020. "Campaign contests," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 127(C).
    4. Florian Mudekereza, 2025. "Aggregate Efficiency in Games," Papers 2501.13019, arXiv.org, revised Feb 2026.
    5. Gradwohl, Ronen & Heller, Yuval & Hillman, Arye, 2022. "Social Media and Democracy," MPRA Paper 113609, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    6. Ronen Gradwohl & Yuval Heller & Arye Hillman, 2022. "Social Media and Democracy," Papers 2206.14430, arXiv.org.
    7. Dana Sisak & Philipp Denter, 2024. "Truth, Lies, and Social Ties: When Image Concerns Fuel Fake News," Papers 2410.19557, arXiv.org, revised Nov 2025.
    8. Gradwohl, Ronen & Heller, Yuval & Hillman, Arye, 2025. "How social media can undermine democracy," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 86(C).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness
    • P16 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Capitalist Economies - - - Capitalist Institutions; Welfare State

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:econjl:v:131:y:2021:i:637:p:2033-2057.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press or the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/resssea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.