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arxiv 1910.11405 v15 pith:Z62VQSTM submitted 2019-10-24 econ.GN econ.THq-fin.EC

The Politics of Personalized News Aggregation

classification econ.GN econ.THq-fin.EC
keywords newspolarizationpolicyvotersaggregationpersonalizedcandidatesdisciplining
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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We study how personalized news aggregation for rationally inattentive voters (NARI) affects policy polarization and public opinion. In a two-candidate electoral competition model, an attention-maximizing infomediary aggregates source data about candidates' valence into easy-to-digest news. Voters decide whether to consume news, trading off the expected gain from improved expressive voting against the attention cost. NARI generates policy polarization even if candidates are office-motivated. Personalized news aggregation makes extreme voters the disciplining entity of policy polarization, and the skewness of their signals is crucial for sustaining a high degree of policy polarization in equilibrium. Analysis of disciplining voters yields insights into the equilibrium and welfare consequences of regulating infomediaries.

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