position auctions with consumer search this paper examines a model in which advertisers bid for sponsored link positions on a search engine the value advertisers derive from each position is endogenized as coming from sales to a population of consumers who make rational inferences about rm qualities and search optimally consumer search strategies equilibrium bidding and the welfare benets of position auctions are analyzed implications for reserve prices and a number of other auction design questions are discussed

accuracy of response in labor market surveys evidence and implications this paper examines the extent of response errors in labor market survey data and explores the implications of such errors for economic analysis explicitly examined are responses to questions on industry occupation union status hours worked and wages analyses are based on two sources 1 a special supplement to the january 1977 current population survey that obtained data from workers and their employers and 2 an exact match of workers and their employers interviewed in the employment opportunity pilot project survey the dual nature of these surveys provides a basis for analyzing the effect of response error on a variety of economic analyses including the trade off between wages and risk the wage impact of unionism and the sensitivity of wage determination models to alternative responses to earnings questions

betting on hitler the value of political connections in nazi germany this paper examines the value of connections between german industry and the nazi movement in early 1933 drawing on previously unused contemporary sources about management and supervisory board composition and stock returns we find that one out of seven firms and a large proportion of the biggest companies had substantive links with the national socialist german workers party firms supporting the nazi movement experienced unusually high returns outperforming unconnected ones by 5 to 8 between january and march 1933 these results are not driven by sectoral composition and are robust to alternative estimators and definitions of affiliation

on the simple economics of advertising marketing and product design we propose a framework for analyzing transformations of demand such transformations frequently stem from changes in the dispersion of consumers valuations which lead to rotations of the demand curve in many settings profits are a u shaped function of dispersion high dispersion is complemented by niche production and low dispersion is complemented by mass market supply we investigate numerous applications including product design advertising marketing and sales advice and the construction of quality differentiated product lines we also suggest a new taxonomy of advertising distinguishing between hype which shifts demand and real information which rotates demand

media bias and influence evidence from newspaper endorsements this paper investigates the relationship between media bias and the inuence of the media on voting in the context of newspaper endorsements werst develop a simple econometric model in which voters choose candidates under uncertainty and rely on endorsements from better informed sources newspapers are potentially biased in favor of one of the candidates and voters thus rationally ac count for the credibility of any endorsements our primary empiricalnding is that endorsements are inuential in the sense that voters are more likely to support the recommended candidate after publication of the endorsement the degree of this inuence however depends upon the credibility of the endorsement in this way endorsements for the democratic candidate from left leaning news papers are less inuential than are endorsements from neutral or right leaning or newspapers and likewise for endorsements for the republican thesendings suggest that voters do rely on the media for information during campaigns but that the extent of this reliance depends upon the degree and direction of any bias

facilitating fit revelation in the competitive market this study examines firms strategic decisions in the competitive market regarding whether to engage in marketing activities to assist consumers in finding the fit between their personal tastes and products horizontal attributes we find that competitive firms strategies to facilitate fit revelation critically depend on the product qualities they offer in particular a firm offering a high quality product is more likely to facilitate fit revelation in the competitive market than it would as a market monopolist whereas a firm offering a low quality product is less likely to do so in addition the firm offering the high quality product implements fit revealing activities in a greater intensity than its rival that offers the low quality product if the quality difference between the two products is small and both products qualities are sufficiently high

inflexible rules in incentive problems in practice contracts involve standard terms or rules allowing for variations only under exceptional circumstances we develop a simple model in which optimal contracts display this feature even in the absence of transactions costs rules arise when an agent has countervailing incentives to misrepresent private information these incentives are created by endowing the agent with a critical factor of production ex ante applications in regulatory labor and legal settings

the impact of low skilled immigration on the youth labor market the employment to population rate of high school aged youth has fallen by about 20 percentage points since the late 1980s one potential explanation is increased competition from substitutable labor such as immigrants i demonstrate that the increase in the population of less educated immigrants has had a considerably more negative effect on employment outcomes for native youth than for native adults at least two factors are at work there is greater overlap between the jobs that youth and less educated adult immigrants traditionally do and youth labor supply appears more responsive to immigration induced wage changes

a theory of credibility this paper presents models in which one agent must decide whether to trust another whose motives are uncertain reliability can only be communicated through actions in this context it pays for people to build a reputation based on reliable behaviour someone becomes credible by consistently providing accurate and valuable information or by performing useful services the theory provides a justification for long term arrangements without binding contracts it also describes those situations where it pays an agent to cash in on his reputation many decisions depend on trusting someone consumers must decide whether to believe advertisements banks need to judge the reliability of loan applicants and employers must decide how much responsibility to delegate to their employees this paper attempts to model situations that arise when someone is uncertain about whether to trust the people he deals with in this context reputations for reliability are valuable an agent becomes credible by consistently providing accurate valuable information or by always acting responsibly i analyse a series of simple abstract models of information transmission in the basic model there are two agents the sender s and the receiver r who are to play the game a known finite number of times at each stage both players learn the value of a parameter measuring the importance of that period s play of the game that is the value of making a correct decision and s obtains payoff relevant information s then sends a signal to r who makes a decision that affects the welfare of both players after both players learn the consequences of r s decision the process repeats at each stage r must decide what action to take in order to do that he must assess the credibility of s the difficulty arises because r is uncertain about s s preferences when play begins i model this by assuming that with positive probability s has identical preferences to r s is a friend and with positive probability s has completely opposed preferences to r s is an enemy this uncertainty creates a trade off for enemy senders at each stage providing honest information enhances s s reputation but only at the expense of foregoing an opportunity for immediate gain by duping r the possibility that s is a friend lends credibility to what he says but this credibility may also be exploited by an enemy s the principal equilibrium has the following form in the basic model where s has no control over the importance of a given play s typically conveys accurate information for the first several periods r raises the probability he places on s being friendly after receiving accurate information if he believes that an enemy would have lied to him with positive probability the more important the information the more likely an enemy will attempt to deceive r an enemy will eventually take advantage of r by misleading him when this happens the sender loses all opportunities for deception in the future i

misselling through agents this paper analyzes the implications of the inherent conflict between two tasks performed by direct marketing agents prospecting for customers and advis ing on the product s suitability for the specific needs of customers when structuring salesforce compensation firms trade off the expected losses from misselling unsuitable products with the agency costs of providing market ing incentives we characterize how the equilibrium amount of misselling and thus the scope of policy intervention depends on features of the agency problem including the internal organization of a firm s sales process the transparency of its commission structure and the steepness of its agents sales incentives jel m31 m37 m52 when purchasing unfamiliar products consumers often rely on information and advice pro vided by representatives of the seller this creates the possibility of misselling the question able practice of a salesperson selling a product that may not match a customer s specific needs 1 this problem is particularly severe in markets for technically complex products such as con sumer electronics auto repairs medical care and retail financial services including securities pensions insurance policies and mortgages an important feature of these markets is that the seller often deals with the customer through an agent rather than directly for example financial brokers typically recommend purchase of a specific product after inquiring about their customers particular circumstances and needs the possibility of abuse has led to regulation in some of these markets most notably for securities transactions the financial industry regulatory authority finra the major self regulatory organization for securities firms operating in the united states mandates that broker dealers make a reasonable effort to obtain information about the individual characteristics of their noninstitutional cus tomers and to ensure that their recommendations are suitable to customers financial situations

does local school control raise student outcomes evidence on the roles of school autonomy and parental participation abstract school autonomy and parental participation have been frequently proposed as ways of making schools more productive less clear is how governments can foster decentralized decision making by local schools this article shows that across eight latin american countries most of the variation in local control over school decisions exists within and not between countries that implies that the exercise of local authority to manage schools is largely a local choice only modestly influenced by constitutional stipulations regarding jurisdiction over school personnel curriculum and facilities as a consequence estimated impacts of local school autonomy parental participation or school supplies on student performance must account for the endogeneity of local efforts to manage schools empirical tests confirm that local managerial effort by the principal and parents and the adequacy of school supplies are strongly influenced by parental human capital and the size and remoteness of the community and th

promotional reviews an empirical investigation of online review manipulation abstract firms incentives to manufacture biased user reviews impede review usefulness we examine the differences in reviews for a given hotel between two sites expedia com only a customer can post a review and tripadvisor com anyone can post we argue that the net gains from promotional reviewing are highest for independent hotels with single unit owners and lowest for branded chain hotels with multiunit owners we demonstrate that the hotel neighbors of hotels with a high incentive to fake have more negative reviews on tripadvisor relative to expedia hotels with a high incentive to fake have more positive reviews on tripadvisor relative to expedia jel l15 l83 m31

the effect of newspaper entry and exit on electoral politics we use new data on entries and exits of us daily newspapers from 1869 to 2004 to estimate effects on political participation party vote shares and electoral competitiveness our identification strategy exploits the precise timing of these events and allows for the possibility of confounding trends we find that newspapers have a robust positive effect on political participation with one additional newspaper increasing both presidential and congressional turnout by approximately 0 3 percentage points newspaper competition is not a key driver of turnout our effect is driven mainly by the first newspaper in a market and the effect of a second or third paper is significantly smaller the effect on presidential turnout diminishes after the introduction of radio and television while the estimated effect on congressional turnout remains similar up to recent years we find no evidence that partisan newspapers affect party vote shares with confidence intervals that rule out even moderate sized effects we find no clear evidence that newspapers systematically help or hurt incumbents

persuasion by cheap talk we consider the credibility persuasiveness and informativ eness of multidimensional cheap talk by an expert to a decision maker we find that an expert with state independent preferences can always make credible comparative statements that trade off the expert s incentive to exaggerate on each dimension such communication benefits the expert cheap talk is persuasive if her preferences are quasiconvex communication benefits a decision maker by allowing for a more informed decision but strategic interactions between multiple decision makers can reverse this gain we apply these results to topics including product recommendations voting auction disclosure and advertising jel d44 d72 d82 d83 m37

historical antisemitism ethnic specialization and financial development historically european jews have specialized in financial services while being the victims of antisemitism we find that the present day demand for finance is lower in german counties where historical antisemitism was higher compared to otherwise similar counties households in counties with high historical antisemitism have similar saving rates but invest less in stocks hold lower saving deposits and are less likely to get a mortgage to finance homeownership after controlling for wealth and a rich set of current and historical covariates present day antisemitism and supply side forces do not fully explain the results households in counties where historical antisemitism was higher distrust the financial sector more a potential cultural externality of historical antisemitism that reduces wealth accumulation in the long run

using state child labor laws to identify the effect of school year work on high school achievement this article uses variation in the labor supply of twelfth grade students created by interstate variations in child labor laws to estimate the effect of school year work on twelfth grade math achievement the instrumental variable estimates in this article indicate that an exogenous decrease in school year hours worked of 10 hours per week would result in a 0 2 standard deviation increase in math scores comparisons to ordinary least squares estimates suggest that failure to account for the endogeneity of the labor supply decisions of high school students will result in underestimates of the negative impact of school year work on academic achievement

radio s impact on public spending if informed voters receive favorable policies then the invention of a new mass medium may affect government policies since it affects who is informed and who is not these ideas are developed in a voting model the model forms the basis for an empirical investigation of a major new deal relief program implemented in the middle of the expansion period of radio the main empirical finding is that u s counties with many radio listeners received more relief funds more funds were allocated to poor counties with high unemployment but controlling for these and other variables the effects of radio are large and highly significant

radio and the rise of the nazis in prewar germany how far can the media protect or undermine democratic institutions in unconsolidated democracies and how persuasive can they be in ensuring public support for dictator s policies we study this question in the context of germany between 1929 and 1939 using geographical and temporal variation in radio availability we show that radio had a significant negative effect on the nazi electoral support between 1929 and 1932 when political news were slanted against nazi party this effect was reversed in just 5 weeks following hitler s appointment as chancellor and the transfer of control of the radio to the nazis pro nazi radio propaganda caused higher vote for the nazis in march 1933 election after full consolidation of power radio propaganda helped the nazis to enroll new party members and encouraged denunciations of jews and other open expressions of anti semitism the effect of nazi propaganda was not uniform depending on listeners priors about the message propaganda could be very effective or could backfire nazi radio was most effective in places where anti semitism was historically high and had a negative effect on the support for anti semitic policies in places with historically low anti semitism

cheap talk with two audiences these problems have in common a simple structure an informed sender says something to two interested but uninformed receivers who then take actions based on their beliefs these actions affect the sender as well as the receivers in this paper we study how costless nonverifiable claims cheap talk can affect these beliefs and hence the actions and how the incentives for truthful revelation to one receiver are affected by the presence of the other we then ask how welfare is affected by whether claims are made in public or in private as some of the above examples suggest public messages may be more credible than private messages addressed to either audience one possibility is that the presence of one audience can discipline the sender s relationship with the other we call this one sided

selection on observed and unobserved variables assessing the effectiveness of catholic schools in this paper we measure the effect of catholic high school attendance on educational attainment and test scores because we do not have a good instrumental variable for catholic school attendance we develop new estimation methods based on the idea that the amount of selection on the observed explanatory variables in a model provides a guide to the amount of selection on the unobservables we also propose an informal way to assess selectivity bias based on measuring the ratio of selection on unobservables to selection on observables that would be required if one is to attribute the entire effect of catholic school attendance to selection bias we use our methods to estimate the effect of attending a catholic high school on a variety of outcomes our main conclusion is that catholic high schools substantially increase the probability of graduating from high school and more tentatively attending college we find little evidence of an effect on test scores

why resource poor dictators allow freer media a theory and evidence from panel data every dictator dislikes free media yet many nondemocratic countries have partially free or almost free media in this article we develop a theory of media freedom in dictatorships and provide systematic statistical evidence in support of this theory in our model free media allow a dictator to provide incentives to bureaucrats and therefore to improve the quality of government the importance of this benefit varies with the natural resource endowment in resource rich countries bureaucratic incentives are less important for the dictator hence media freedom is less likely to emerge using panel data we show that controlling for country fixed effects media are less free in oil rich economies with the effect especially pronounced in nondemocratic regimes these results are robust to model specification and the inclusion of various controls including the level of economic development democracy country size size of government and others

supplying information to facilitate price discrimination the authors examine the incentive of a seller to allow potential buyers to acquire private information about their tastes for the seller s product improved private information for buyers enables the seller to segment the market and charge higher prices to high value buyers however improved information can also provide rents to buyers in a variety of settings this tradeoff is optimally resolved at one of two extremes either buyers are supplied with the best available knowledge of their tastes or no information is supplied by the seller copyright 1994 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

cheap talk advertising and misrepresentation in vertically differentiated markets i consider a cheap talk model in which a firm has a chance to communicate its product quality to consumers the model describes how advertising can be both informative to consumers and profitable for the firm through its content in a vertically differentiated market i find that advertising content may be effective in inducing search even if incentives for misrepresentation exist in particular a firm with an undesirable low quality product is able to attract consumers who would have not incurred a search cost had they known its true quality in this case a semiseparating equilibrium occurs where the lowest firm types pool upward in order to increase the expected product quality while simultaneously signaling that the product is affordable although consumers always benefit from truth in advertising total welfare may decrease if an undesirable firm is required to reveal its type finally i show that the extent to which misrepresentation can take place increases with the cost of advertising coverage

media and political persuasion evidence from russia this paper compares electoral outcomes of 1999 parliamentary elections in russia among geographical areas with differential access to the only national tv channel independent from the government it was available to three quarters of russia s population and its signal availability was idiosyncratic conditional on observables independent tv decreased aggregate vote for the government party by 8 9 percentage points increased the combined vote for major opposition parties by 6 3 percentage points and decreased turnout by 3 8 percentage points the probability of voting for opposition parties increased for individuals who watched independent tv even controlling for voting intentions measured one month before elections jel d72 l82 p26

the unintended consequences of internet diffusion evidence from malaysia abstract can the introduction of the internet undermine incumbent power in a semi authoritarian regime i examine this question using evidence from malaysia where the incumbent coalition lost its 40 year monopoly on power in 2008 i develop a novel methodology for measuring internet penetration matching ip addresses with physical locations and apply it to the 2004 to 2008 period in malaysia using distance to the backbone to instrument for endogenous internet penetration i find that internet exposure accounts for 6 6 points nearly half the swing against the incumbent party in 2008 i find limited evidence of increased turnover and no evidence of an effect on turnout

competition through commissions and kickbacks in markets for retail financial products and health services consumers often rely on the advice of intermediaries to decide which specialized offering best fits their needs product providers in turn compete to influence the intermediaries advice through hidden kickbacks or disclosed commissions motivated by the controversial role of these widespread practices we formulate a model to analyze competition through commissions from a positive and normative standpoint the model highlights the role of commissions in making the advisor responsive to supply side incentives we characterize situations when commonly adopted policies such as mandatory disclosure and caps on commissions have unintended welfare consequences jel d21 d82 d83 g21 l15 l25

the inadvertent consequences of al qaeda news coverage abstract this paper explores the consequences of al qaeda news coverage related to i subsequent al qaeda attacks ii the group s popularity and iii radicalization i construct a daily index of al qaeda news coverage in the us from cnn nbc cbs fox news the nyt and the wapo to isolate causality i employ an instrumental variable strategy based on disaster deaths everything else equal the us media reports less on al qaeda when more people are dying from disasters worldwide at its mean al qaeda coverage is suggested to cause 0 2 0 3 attacks per day in the upcoming 1 4 weeks i find no evidence that attacks are merely rescheduled because of diminished media exposure rather the total number of attacks increases with coverage this effect is driven by easy to plan attack types and by al qaeda attacks in iraq results are robust to an array of alternative specifications and consistent when considering news coverage on al jazeera al qaeda coverage also increases the group s online popularity and search topics that are potentially indicative of radicalization such as jihad and al qaeda s magazine inspire are receiving more attention on google nevertheless these results should be interpreted carefully as it remains difficult to fully disentangle online interest in al qaeda and sympathy with the group s mission

government control of the media abstract we present a formal model of government control of the media to illuminate variation in media freedom across countries and over time media bias is greater and state ownership of the media more likely when the government has a particular interest in mobilizing citizens to take actions that further some political objective but are not necessarily in citizens individual best interest however the distinction between state and private media is smaller large advertising markets reduce media bias in both state and private media but increase the incentive for the government to nationalize private media media bias in state and private media markets diverge as governments become more democratic whereas media bias in democracies and autocracies converge as positive externalities from mobilization increase

cheap talk and the fed a theory of imprecise policy announcments this paper examines the problem faced by the federal reserve in announcing its private information about its future policies because it would like to manipulate expectations and pursue a time inconsistent policy the fed cannot reveal its policy objectives precisely and credibly it can however communicate some information about its goals through the cheap talk mechanism of vincent crawford and joel sobel making announcements that are imprecise and only giving ranges within which these goals may lie copyright 1989 by american economic association

media bias in china this paper examines whether and how market competition affected the political bias of government owned newspapers in china from 1981 to 2011 we measure media bias based on coverage of government mouthpiece content propaganda relative to commercial content we first find that a reform that forced newspaper exits reduced competition affected media bias by increasing product specialization with some papers focusing on propaganda and others on commercial content second lower level governments produce less biased content and launch commercial newspapers earlier eroding higher level governments political goals third bottom up competition intensifies the politico economic tradeoff leading to product proliferation and less audience exposure to propaganda

television and voter turnout i use variation across markets in the timing of television s introduction to identify its impact on voter turnout the estimated effect is significantly negative accounting for between a quarter and a half of the total decline in turnout since the 1950s i argue that substitution away from other media with more political coverage provides a plausible mechanism linking television to voting as evidence for this i show that the entry of television in a market coincided with sharp drops in consumption of newspapers and radio and in political knowledge as measured by election surveys i also show that both the information and turnout effects were largest in off year congressional elections which receive extensive coverage in newspapers but little or no coverage on television

when does a firm disclose product information a firm chooses a price and the product information it discloses to a consumer whose tastes are privately known we provide a necessary and sufficient condition on the match function for full disclosure to be the unique equilibrium outcome whatever the costs and prior beliefs about product and consumer types it allows for products with different qualities as well as some horizontal match heterogeneity with independently distributed product and consumer types full disclosure is always an equilibrium and a necessary and sufficient equilibrium condition is that all firm types earn at least the full disclosure profit

media influence on vote choices unemployment news and incumbents electoral prospects how does news about the economy influence voting decisions we isolate the effect of the information environment from the effect of change in the underlying economic conditions themselves by taking

facts alternative facts and fact checking in times of post truth politics abstract how effective is fact checking in countervailing alternative facts i e misleading statements by politicians in a randomized online experiment during the 2017 french presidential election campaign we subjected subgroups of 2480 french voters to alternative facts by the extreme right candidate marine le pen and or corresponding facts about the european refugee crisis from official sources we find that i alternative facts are highly persuasive ii fact checking improves factual knowledge of voters iii but it does not affect policy conclusions or support for the candidate iv exposure to facts alone does not decrease support for the candidate even though voters update their knowledge we find evidence consistent with the view that at least part of the effect can be explained by raising salience of the immigration issue

cheap talk comparisons in multi issue bargaining abstract bargaining over two issues as a bundle permits credible cheap talk about their relative importance even when interests are directly opposed on each issue the resulting communication gains can exceed the gains from bundling previously identified in the monopoly pricing literature

price and advertising signals of product quality we present a signaling model based on ideas of phillip nelson in which both the introductory price and the level of directly uninformative advertising or other dissipative marketing expenditures are choice variables and may be used as signals for the initially unobservable quality of a newly introduced experience good repeat purchases play a crucial role in our model a second focus of the paper is on illustrating an approach to refining the set of equilibria in signalling games with multiple potential signals

pandering to persuade a principal chooses one of multiple projects or an outside option an agent is privately informed about the projects benets and shares the principal s preferences except for not internalizing her value from the outside option we show that for moderate outside option values strategic communication is characterized by pandering the agent biases his recommendation toward conditionally better looking projects even when both parties would be better o with some other project a project that has lower expected value can be conditionally better looking we develop some comparative statics of pandering pandering is also induced by an optimal mechanism without transfers

selective reporting of factual content by commercial media the authors study the market for factual content and examine whether competition increases or decreases its provision factual content is supplied by commercial media firms which observe a set of facts depicting the state of the world and selectively decide how to report them consumers value content that matches their opinion which incentivizes media firms to slant their reports by omitting certain facts novel features in the authors model include consumers ability to anticipate the media s incentives for slant and the requirement that all media stances must be supported by facts furthermore consumers find reports with more facts to be more convincing despite consumers ability to detect slant and their demand for factual support the research shows that competition results in consumers reading fewer facts and being unable to update their prior beliefs about the state of the world the authors also find that a monopoly medium may be more polarizing than competitive media and that polarized report

comparative advertising disclosing horizontal match information improved consumer information about horizontal aspects of products of similar quality leads to better consumer matching but also to higher prices so consumer surplus can go up or down while profits rise with enough quality asymmetry though the higher quality and hence larger firm s price falls with more information so both effects benefit consumers this occurs when comparative advertising is used against a large firm by a small one comparative advertising as it imparts more information therefore helps consumers although it also improves the profitability of the small firm overall welfare goes down because of the large loss to the attacked firm

persuasive puffery sellers often make claims about product strengths without providing evidence even though such claims are mere puffery we show that they can be credible because talking up any one strength comes at the implicit trade off of not talking up another potential strength puffery pulls in some buyers who value product attributes that are talked up or emphasized while pushing away other buyers who infer that the attributes they value are relative weaknesses when the initial probability of making a sale is low there are more potential buyers to pull in than to push away so puffery is persuasive overall this persuasiveness requires that buyers have some privacy about their preferences so that the seller does not completely pander to them more generally the results show how comparative cheap talk by an expert to a decision maker can be credible and persuasive in standard discrete choice models used throughout marketing economics and other disciplines

strategic communication with lying costs i study a model of strategic communication between an uninformed receiver and an informed but upwardly biased sender the sender bears a cost of lying or more broadly of misrepresenting his private information the main results show that inflated language naturally arises in this environment where the sender almost always claims to be of a higher type than he would with complete information regardless of the intensity of lying cost there is incomplete separation with some pooling on the highest messages the degree of language inflation and how much information is revealed depend upon the intensity of lying cost the analysis delivers a framework to span a class of cheap talk and verifiable disclosure games unifying the polar predictions they make under large conflicts of interest i use the model to discuss how the degree of manipulability of information can affect the trade off between delegation and communication copyright 2009 wiley blackwell

are biased media bad for democracy this paper assesses the normative and positive claims regarding the consequences of biased media using a political agency framework with a strategic voter polarized politicians and news providers my model predicts that voters are always better informed with unbiased than biased outlets even when the latter have opposite ideological preferences however biased media may improve voter welfare contrary to several scholars fear partisan news providers are not always bad for democracy my theoretical findings also have important implications for empirical analyses of the electoral consequences of changes in the media environment left wing and right wing biased outlets have heterogeneous effects on electoral outcomes which need to be properly accounted for existing empirical studies are unlikely to measure the consequences of biased media as researchers never observe and can rarely approximate the adequate counterfactual elections with unbiased news outlets