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Home | Events Archive | Do People Value More Informative News
Seminar

Do People Value More Informative News


  • Series
  • Speaker(s)
    Chris Roth (Briq Institute, Germany)
  • Field
    Organizations and Markets
  • Location
    Erasmus University Rotterdam, Mandeville Building, Room T3-34
    Rotterdam
  • Date and time

    May 23, 2019
    12:00 - 13:00

Abstract

We examine how perceptions of media bias affect demand for news. Drawing

on large representative samples of the US population with approximately 10,000

respondents, we measure and experimentally manipulate people’s beliefs about the

extent to which newspapers strategically suppress information. Inconsistent with the

“more-information-is-better principle,” we find that people who learn that a newspaper

is less likely to strategically suppress information have a lower demand for news

from this newspaper. The results from the main experiment and a series of follow-up

experiments demonstrate that people have a demand for biased news, consistent with

a desire to confirm pre-existing beliefs. We discuss the implications of our findings

for the regulation of media markets.