Competition and Cognition in the Market for Online News

Résumé du livre

Does it pay to appear unbiased in an attention-based economy where bias sells? We consider this question in a context with growing consumer polarization and partisan and neutral online news providers. We provide a game-theoretic framework that captures many essential properties of the online news market and show that polarization may constrain neutral and partisan news websites' engagement-enhancing strategies. For instance, if polarization is unbalanced (i.e, the sides do not equally dislike each other), neutral and partisan websites can fail to enhance engagement.Moreover, polarization benefits neutral websites more than partisan ones. We also demonstrate that news framing strategies affect online consumption utility in unexpected ways and that reducing partisan news consumption does not necessarily improve utility. Given rising polarization and AI and machine learning tools taking over cognitive processes, our work advances the discussion on online news neutrality, perceptions of source and content neutrality, and online news media regulation.