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arXiv · 1910.11405

The Politics of Personalized News Aggregation

Lin Hu·Anqi Li·Ilya Segal
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Abstract

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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Lin Hu, Anqi Li, Ilya Segal. 2019-10-24. The Politics of Personalized News Aggregation. https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.11405

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