does informative media commentary reduce politicians incentives to pander abstract elections sometimes give policy makers incentives to pander i e to implement a policy that voters think is in their best interest even though the policy maker knows that a different policy is actually better for the voters pandering incentives are typically attenuated when voters learn prior to the election whether the policy chosen by the incumbent truly was in their best interest this suggests that the media can improve accountability by reporting to voters information about whether an incumbent made good policy choices we show that although media monitoring does sometimes eliminate the incumbent s incentive to pander in other cases it makes the problem of pandering worse furthermore in some circumstances incumbent incentives are improved when the media acts as a yes man suppressing some information that indicates the policy maker made the wrong choice we explain these seemingly paradoxical results by focusing on how media commentary affects voters tendency to apply an asymmetric burden of proof to the incumbent based on whether she pursues popular or unpopular policies

immigrant specificity and the relationship between trade and immigration theory and evidence studies routinely document that immigrant employment concentrates in non traded goods sectors and that many immigrants have low inter sectoral mobility we consider these observed characteristics of immigrant employment with regard to the question of how immigration affects a nation s pattern of production and trade we model an economy producing three goods one is non traded domestic labor and capital are domestically mobile but internationally immobile allowing that some new immigrants will become specific to the non traded goods sector the model indicates that the effects of immigration on output and trade depend importantly on the sectoral pattern of employment of both new and existing immigrants empirical investigation in a panel data set of oecd countries supports the model s prediction that immigration raises the output of non traded goods consistent with the model we also find that immigration and trade are complements given its empirical support the model s implications for immigration policy are then discussed

a probabilistic choice model for market segmentation and elasticity structure marketing scholars commonly characterize market structure by studying the patterns of substitution implied by brand switching though the approach is useful it typically ignores the destabilizing

trade liberalization and factor price convergence abstract this paper examines the effects of trade liberalization on international disparities in factor real returns in a model with more factors than goods existing trade interventions are assumed to be restricting trade we find that any bias for or against factor price convergence depends on the underlying source of comparative advantage where trade is based on differences in factor endowments trade liberalization has a bias towards factor price convergence where trade is based on technology differences biases are more difficult to detect but if they exist they are likely to work against factor price convergence

a segment level model of category volume and brand choice it is an everyday marketplace occurrence that brands lose and gain share however a brand s sales gain or loss can be attributable to very different factors and thus understanding the sources of sales gain or loss would seem to be an important aspect of a brand manager s job the primary purpose of this research is to develop a model that can answer the following questions i what are the sources of gain or loss of a brand s sales due to category volume and brand switching ii what consumer and marketing characteristics affect consumers purchase frequency of the product category and that of different brands iii do all consumers behave similarly or are there distinct segments which respond to marketing actions differently iv if such segments exist what is the size and composition of each segment and what is the appropriate strategy for each group of consumers our modeling approach which decomposes a brand s sales into category volume and brand choice components has many similarities and also several differences with traditional approaches similar to the nbd and dirichlet models we assume that a consumer s category purchase rate follows a poisson distribution and the number of purchases per brand follows a multinomial distribution our model differs from traditional models by including marketing mix variables by accounting for loyal or near loyal consumers by explicitly incorporating consideration sets and by segmenting consumers on the basis of their brand perceptions and their responses to marketing mix variables we account for consumer hetereogeneity by identifying homogeneous latent segments that capture differences in consumers response to marketing variables in both brand choice and category volume behavior calibration of the category volume and brand choice models and the separation of loyalty and switching segments are done simultaneously so that there is no need to assume any specific hierarchy and in contrast to the usual assumption of independence between choice and volume which may be unreasonable at the aggregate level the requirement is that choice and volume decisions be independent only at the segment level we investigate the properties of our model in the context of a national survey of supermarket purchases of jumbo paper towels 2 500 households were surveyed who were asked to provide information on rolls of paper towels bought in the last 4 weeks rolls of each brand of paper towel bought in the last 4 weeks brand usually bought brands that a household bought or would consider buying average price paid or expected for each brand bought or considered ratings on 20 brand attributes e g strength absorbency etc and demographic information e g family size we found that not only did the modeling framework outperform a variety of competing models it also provided insights into the competitive structure in this market the loyal segments could be distinguished on the basis of price sensitivity less than 10 of the loyal households were price insensitive and in general households showed increasing price sensitivity in their category volume decisions if they had more children and were heavier users of paper towels this was consistent across all brands the model estimates that about 71 of the households are switchers and five switching segments are needed to characterize household purchase patterns two of the largest switching segments labeled as price sensitive and value segments are very price sensitive in both their brand choice and category volume components in both these segments private label brands are dominant with about 30 share segments also emerged on the basis of strength absorbency and tearing ease of paper towels interestingly we found that brand shares within these segments are quite consistent with the objective quality ratings of brands as given by consumer reports finally price elasticity analysis for one of the brands bounty reveals that a 5 drop in bounty s price increases its sales by 13 6 almost half of this increase comes from brand switching with the other half coming from increases in category volume e g stockpiling bounty gains the most from the price sensitive segments price and value segments private labels are hurt least by bounty s price cut

asymmetric effects of endowment changes on foreign investment source and host countries this paper explores the asymmetric impact of factor endowment changes on foreign investment source and host countries using a ricardo wilson multifactor continuum of goods model where there is a technological basis for trade even if the countries are equivalent in all respects except for capital endowments it is discovered that host country capital growth must be immiserizing in the source country provided that the two countries are initially alike in all respects except for capital endowments while a stringent single good macdougall kemp restriction suffices to guarantee that source country labor growth is immiserizing in the host country initial equivalence between countries is insufficient

purchase frequency bias in random coefficients brand choice models conventional random coefficients models of conditional brand choice using panel data ignore the dependence of the random coefficients distribution on the purchase frequencies we show that this leads to biased estimates and propose a conditional likelihood approach to obtain unbiased estimates unlike alternative approaches that require observation of no purchase occasions our proposed method relies only on purchase data furthermore our approach does not require that the researcher specify the distribution of purchase frequencies as a result estimates of the brand choice model are unaffected by misspecification of the model of purchase frequencies we demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach in simulated data and in scanner data we find that results differ substantively from the conventional latent class model in terms of segment membership probabilities segment characteristics and price elasticities

independent auditors bias and political agency abstract this paper analyzes political agency with endogenous information collection and revelation by third party auditors while increasing incentives for auditors to provide information straightforwardly improves political control a small amount of pro incumbent bias can also be useful for maintaining high levels of control when the equilibrium level of control is high most investigations uncover positive information about the incumbent since positive information increases reelection rates mildly pro incumbent auditors are willing to work harder than unbiased auditors in these equilibria for moderate levels of control pro incumbent auditors are again useful due to their extra effort even though they may suppress some negative information in equilibrium only when market incentives are low so equilibrium control is weak are unbiased or anti incumbent biased auditors better for voters than mildly pro incumbent auditors

oligarchies and development in a global economy a tale of two elites this paper studies how comparative advantage and the political elites endowments shape long run performance in economies with imperfect political institutions the trade regime interacts with industrial policy and regulations on capital mobility in governing capital accumulation in a capital scarce economy capitalist oligarchs striving for import substitution industrialization isi initially shelter the economy from trade while promoting industrial policies that promote total factor productivity growth in the manufacturing sector this gradually shifts the comparative advantage toward manufacturing and renders the economy attractive to foreign investors allowing for trade and foreign capital inflows are thus complementary policies that spur growth in the capital oligarchy by contrast landed oligarchs in a capital scarce economy favor openness to trade at an early stage of development neglect industrial policies and block foreign capital to maximize extractable rents the policy mix causes the economy to stagnate consistent with the experiences of south korea and argentina in the postwar era the model predicts that the success of isi policies depends crucially on the conditions governing the incentives for capital accumulation jel f10 f20 p40 p50 o10 o24

persistent media bias abstract the news media plays an essential role in society but surveys indicate that the public views the media as biased this paper presents a theory of media bias that originates with private information obtained by journalists through their investigations and persists despite profit maximizing news organizations and rivalry from other news organizations bias has two effects on the demand for news first rational individuals are more skeptical of potentially biased news and thus rely less on it in their decision making this skepticism reduces demand and leads the news organization to set a lower price for its publication the greater is the bias it tolerates lower quality news thus commands a lower price second bias makes certain stories more likely than others given their private information journalists may bias their stories if their career prospects can be advanced by being published on the front page news organizations can control bias by restricting the discretion allowed to journalists but granting discretion and tolerating bias can increase profits if it allows journalists to be hired at a lower wage bias is not driven from the market by a rival news organization nor by a news organization with an opposing bias and the profits of a high bias news organization can be higher than the profits of a low bias one moreover bias can be greater with competition than with a monopoly news organization if individuals collectively choose regulation in place of their individual decision making bias increases the expected stringency of regulation

explaining the absence of international factor price convergence abstract as capital markets have become integrated factor prices have not converged as expected this paper provides an explanation the key observation is that non specific output risks are borne by capital making international portfolio diversification a dominant strategy capital market integration can elicit many patterns of factor price response under this circumstance factor prices will move in parallel if countries are identical when countries differ factor prices may diverge or even have their relative sizes reversed the integration of capital markets affects welfare through changes in risk and in overall returns to savings welfare need not improve

investigating heterogeneity in brand preferences in logit models for panel data in analyzing panel data the issue of heterogeneity across households is an important consideration if heterogeneity is present but is ignored in the analysis it will result in biased and inconsi

the balanced us press we measure the relative ideological positions of newspapers voters interest groups and political parties using data on ballot propositions we exploit the fact that newspapers parties and interest groups take positions on these propositions and the fact that citizens ultimately vote on them we find that on average newspapers in the united states are located almost exactly at the median voter in their states that is they are balanced around the median voter still there is a significant amount of ideological heterogeneity across newspapers which is smaller than the one found for interest groups however when we group propositions by issue area we find a sizable amount of ideological imbalance broadly speaking newspapers are to the left of the state level median voter on many social issues and to the right on many economic issues to complete the picture we use two existing methods of measuring bias and show that the news and editorial sections of newspapers have almost identical partisan positions

bridging trade theory and labour econometrics the effects of international migration this paper surveys current theoretical and empirical research on international migration with a particular emphasis on the links between trade theory and labour empirics

trade in goods and factors with international differences in technology a general model of trade caused by international differences in production technology is developed using techniques of duality theory for the caseof product augmenting differences in technology it is shown that there is a positive correlation between net export and technological superiority such that a country will on average export goods for which the country has superior technolor if some factors are permitted to be internationally traded it is demonstrated via this correlation that the volume of trade must increase thus unlike trade caused by factor endowment differences goods trade caused by product augmenting differences in production technolody is always in this sense complementary with factor trade for factor augmenting technology differences in the absence of factor trade the goods trade pattern is as if it was caused by factor endowment differences with factor trade goods trade and factor trade can then be either complements or substitutes this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

peddling influence through intermediaries a sender may communicate with a decision maker through intermediaries in this model an objective sender and intermediary pass on information truthfully while biased ones favor a particular agenda but also have reputational concerns i show that the biased sender and the biased intermediary s reporting truthfulness are strategic complements the biased sender is less likely to use an intermediary than an objective sender if his reputational concerns are low but more likely to do so if his reputational concerns are moderate moreover the biased sender may be more likely to use an intermediary perceived to be more biased

a spatial theory of media slant and voter choice we develop a theory of media slant as a systematic filtering of political news that reduces multidimensional politics to the one dimensional space perceived by voters economic and political choices are interdependent in our theory expected electoral results influence economic choices and economic choices in turn influence voting behaviour in a two candidate election we show that media favouring the front runner will focus on issues unlikely to deliver a surprise while media favouring the underdog will gamble for resurrection we characterize the socially optimal slant and show that it coincides with the one favoured by the underdog under a variety of circumstances balanced media giving each issue equal coverage may be worse for voters than partisan media

going global and fdi inflows in china one belt one road initiative as a quasi natural experiment this paper investigates the impact of one belt one road as an exogenous policy shock on the utilisation of foreign capital in china in the short term based on provincial panel data for the years 2003 15 the empirical study is conducted with difference in differences design the first difference is whether a province is an obor province and the second is whether one belt one road initiative has been proposed the empirical results suggest the utilisation of foreign capital in obor provinces has decreased significantly compared to non obor provinces after the initiative has been proposed the study has further shown that the obor construction not only means factor movements and projects but also stands for policy shock its impact on utilisation of foreign capital cannot be simply captured by the commonly quantifiable going global indicators namely outward direct investment overseas contracted projects or overseas labour services the negative impact of the initiative on foreign capital utilisation is strongly reflected in the obor provinces with low levels of economic development heavy fiscal burdens and high proportions of state owned economy in the short term the negative impact of the initiative on foreign capital utilisation may be due to its role in resource competition and signal delivering the former means that the obor initiative may induce resource competition between going global and bringing in and the latter suggests that this initiative is likely to be regarded as a signal by foreign investors that going global not bringing in has become the priority of the government

a formalisation and test of the factor productivity explanation of international differences in service prices this paper extends and integrates previous models of the determinants of international differences in the prices of services relative to tradable commodities the authors provide a model capable of identifying the effects of differences in total factor productivity on service price differences separately from the effects of factor endowment differences they propose a method for measuring these factor productivity difference effects and apply this to a sample of sixty countries in 1980 the authors results provide support both for the endowment difference and productivity difference explanations suggesting that in this context at least the two hypotheses are complements rather than competitors copyright 1996 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

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

political polarization and the electoral effects of media bias abstract we develop a model in which profits of media firms depend on their audience ratings and maximizing profits may involve catering to a partisan audience by suppressing information that the partisan audience does not like hearing while voters are rational understand the nature of the news suppression bias and update appropriately important information is lost through bias and can lead to electoral mistakes we characterize those conditions that give rise to electoral mistakes showing that heightened political polarization and asymmetric distributions of voter ideologies make electoral mistakes more likely even if the median ideology is a centrist and centrist voters gain access to unbiased news media bias can generate excessive cross over voting which in turn can lead to the election of the wrong candidate

manipulated news model electoral competition and mass media abstract this paper investigates the relationship between media manipulation the strategic suppression of relevant information by mass media and self mediatization the strategic exploitation of media coverage by candidates in elections in the model a voter cannot directly observe the policies proposed by two office motivated candidates the voter learns this information through media reports before voting takes place while the media outlet suppresses some of this information because the voter s decision making could be incorrect direct distortion the candidates have an incentive to win the election by influencing the media coverage through policy settings indirect distortion as a result policy convergence to the voter s ideal policy occurs if and only if the media bias is sufficiently small we then characterize the set of equilibria in terms of the degree of distortion the results suggest that if either strategic media manipulation or competition among the candidates is omitted then the distortion is nonnegligibly misspecified

disclosure and choice an agent chooses among projects with random outcomes his payoff is increasing in the outcome and in an observer s expectation of the outcome with some probability the agent will be able to disclose some information about the true outcome to the observer we show that choice is inefficient in general we illustrate this point with a characterization of the inefficiencies that result when the agent can perfectly disclose the outcome with some probability and can disclose nothing otherwise as in dye 1985a in this case the agent favours riskier projects even with lower expected returns on the other hand if information can also be disclosed by a challenger who prefers lower beliefs of the observer the chosen project is excessively risky when the agent has better access to information excessively risk averse when the challenger has better access and efficient otherwise we also characterize the agent s worst case equilibrium payoff we give examples of alternative disclosure technologies illustrating other forms the inefficiencies can take for example in a two dimensional setting we demonstrate a hitting for the fences effect where the agent systematically focuses on the harder dimension at the expense of success on the easier

modeling multiple sources of heterogeneity in multinomial logit models methodological and managerial issues we offer a framework to specify and estimate various sources of heterogeneity in multinomial logit brand choice models we let each brand specific intercept and each parameter of the explanatory variable vector vary randomly across households in addition we distinguish loyal households from the rest our results suggest that incorporating multiple sources of heterogeneity improves the model fit and suggests higher impact of marketing mix elements on brand choice we highlight the importance of incorporating multiple sources of heterogeneity the model we implement yields valuable managerial insights

a model of electoral competition with incomplete information a model of two candidate electoral competition is developed in which voters are uncertain about the policy either candidate would implement if elected candidates simultaneously announce policy positions from which voters attempt to infer the true positions the candidates would adopt announcing a position different from the true position is costly to the winning candidate with these costs increasing as the difference between the true policy and the announced policy increases a refinement of the sequential equilibrium concept is used to describe the behavior of candidates and voters

media as watchdogs the role of news media in electoral competition abstract we develop an equilibrium model to analyze the role of the media in electoral competition when policy payoffs are state dependent party policies do not converge to the median voter s ideal policy if the media report only party policies news analysis about the state though possibly biased can discipline off equilibrium deviations and make the parties adopt more centrist policies since voters are rational the party favored by the media need not win with a higher probability instead media bias may reduce the effectiveness of electoral competition and lead to more polarized policies

quid pro quo foreign investment and welfare a political economy theoretic model abstract the classic paper by brecher and diaz alejandro 1977 analyzed the implications of tariff jumping direct foreign investment dfi induced by the imposition of an import tariff we analyze a new type of dfi where it occurs with a view to defusing not circumventing protection or rather the threat of protection by the host country an example is the dfi by japan in the united states the decision about the level of foreign investment is taken in the first of a two period horizon period this together with the level of exports in the first period determines the probability of a quota on exports being imposed in the second period policy makers aware of the effects of the first period decisions on the second period will impose an optimal tariff and an optimal tax subsidy on capital exports

globalisation and factor returns in competitive markets abstract the standard competitive trade model extended to include many goods and factors is used to analyze the effect of goods and factor market integration on average international disparities in the real returns of internationally immobile factors it is shown that goods market integration decreases international real return differentials for all factors we derive sufficient conditions for this result to hold for the subgroup of internationally immobile factors as well while there is a presumption for similar results to hold with international factor market integration we show that this is true for international migration but in general not for international investment

an empirical investigation of the dynamic mcfadden model of purchase timing and brand choice implications for market structure purchase timing and brand choice decisions of households are jointly investigated using the dynamic mcfadden model of heckman and singer the hazard of brand purchase is decomposed into the category purchase hazard and the probability of brand choice conditional on category purchase the former is modeled using the hazard function approach and the latter using a logit model unobserved heterogeneity in brand preferences marketing effects and baseline hazard parameters is accounted for in the empirical analysis the distribution of preference heterogeneity identifies the locations of brands in multiattribute perceptual space and the distribution of attribute importance weights across households

the market for news we investigate the market for news under two assumptions that readers hold beliefs which they like to see confirmed and that newspapers can slant stories toward these beliefs we show that on the topics where readers share common beliefs one should not expect accuracy even from competitive media competition results in lower prices but common slanting toward reader biases on topics where reader beliefs diverge such as politically divisive issues however newspapers segment the market and slant toward extreme positions yet in the aggregate a reader with access to all news sources could get an unbiased perspective generally speaking reader heterogeneity is more important for accuracy in media than competition per se

signaling character in electoral competition we study a one dimensional hotelling downs model of electoral competition with the following innovation a fraction of candidates have character and are exogenously committed to a campaign platform this is unobservable to voters character is desirable and a voter s utility is a convex combination of standard policy preferences and her assessment of a candidate s character this structure induces a signaling game between strategic candidates and voters since a policy platform affects voters utilities not only directly but also indirectly through inferences about a candidate s character the model generates a number of predictions starting with a failure of the median voter theorem jel d72 d82

nash equilibrium tariffs for the united states and canada the roles of country size scale economies and capital mobility a theoretical analysis of optimal nash equilibrium tariff rates is presented a numerical general equilibrium model is then used to find nash equilibrium tariff rates for the united states and canada the nash equilibrium tariffs are small relative to partial equilibrium estimates 18 percent for the united states and 6 percent for canada the united states is essentially indifferent between the nash equilibrium and free trade while canada is better off at the latter by 4 billion empirical results support theoretical predictions that the optimal tariff is smaller when the country is smaller there are scale economies and free entry and capital is internationally mobile

a simultaneous approach to the whether what and how much to buy questions consumer s purchase decisions of whether to buy what to buy and how much to buy are examined simultaneously based on a consumer utility maximization problem an unobservable threshold price about which a consumer pivots from nonpurchase to purchase can be deduced with any model specification the interrelationships between purchase decisions can be explicitly derived the model is applied to coffee purchasing data in addition by suppressing the nonpurchase options the model is compared with an alternative approach appearing in the marketing literature

investigating purchase incidence brand choice and purchase quantity decisions of households we develop a comprehensive utility maximizing framework to study the impact of marketing variables on the category purchase brand choice and purchase quantity decisions of households for frequently purchased packaged goods the model allows for dependence among the three decisions while ensuring that these decisions provide in combination the greatest possible utility to the household by accounting for variations in reservation prices and intrinsic brand preferences across households the modeling framework explicitly captures the effects of unobserved heterogeneity on all three purchase decisions the principal empirical finding from analyzing the a c nielsen data for the yogurt product category is that the substantive implications for the effects of marketing variables are sensitive to whether these effects are determined conditional or unconditional on a product category purchase our results show that reservation prices and intrinsic brand preferences vary across households and not accounting for these variations in the estimation could lead to biased estimates for the coefficients of the marketing variables a comparison of our results to those obtained from a nested logit model of purchase incidence and brand choice reveals that our proposed model performs better using both a formal statistical test as well as the criterion of predictive validity in a holdout sample of panelists further the purchase quantity model compares favorably with two alternative models of quantity choice in the validation sample

mass media competition political competition and public policy if better informed voters receive favourable policies then mass media will affect policy because mass media provide most of the information people use in voting this paper models the incentives of the media to deliver news to different groups the increasing returns to scale technology and advertising financing of media firms induce them to provide more news to large groups such as taxpayers and dispersed consumer interests and groups that are valuable to advertisers this news bias alters the tradeoff in political competition and therefore introduces a bias in public policy the paper also discusses the effects of broadcast media replacing newspapers as the main information source about politics the model predicts that this change should raise spending on government programmes used by poor and rural voters

are international trade and factor mobility substitutes abstract this paper analyzes whether factor flows and commodity trade are substitutes or complements i e whether increasing the level of one impacts adversely or favorably on the volume of the other it derives with the aid of a new general equilibrium framework of the world which allows possible differences in factor endowments tastes and technologies across the two trading countries the necessary and sufficient condition for substitutability and complementarity the results are then further examined in two special cases a survey of different concepts of substitutability and complementarity which have appeared in the literature is also given

relying on the information of interested parties we investigate the conventional wisdom that competition among interested parties attempting to influence a decisionmaker by providing verifiable information elicits all relevant information we find that if the decisionmaker is strategically sophisticated and well informed about the relevant variables and about the preferences of the interested party or parties competition may be unnecessary to achieve this result if the decisionmaker is unsophisticated or not well informed competition is not generally sufficient if the interested parties interests are sufficiently opposed however or if the decisionmaker is seeking to advance the parties welfare then competition can reduce or even eliminate the decisionmaker s need for prior knowledge about the relevant variables and for strategic sophistication in other settings only the combination of competition among information providers and a sophisticated skepticism is sufficient to allow effective decisionmaking

model of brand choice with a no purchase option calibrated to scanner panel data abstract in usual practice researchers specify and estimate brand choice models from purchase data ignoring observations in which category incidence does not occur i e no purchase observations this practice can be problematic if there are unobservable factors that affect the no purchase and the brand choice decisions when such a correlation exists it is important to model simultaneously the no purchase and the brand choice decisions the authors propose a model suitable for scanner panel data in which the no purchase decision depends on the price feature and display of each brand in the category and on household stock of inventory they link the no purchase model to the brand choice outcome through marketing mix covariates and through unobservables that affect both outcomes the authors assume that model parameters are heterogeneous across households and allow for a flexible correlation structure between the coefficients in the no purchase model and those in the brand choice model the model fo

secrecy two sided bias and the value of evidence abstract we provide necessary and sufficient conditions on players preferences for a verifiable message game to possess a separating equilibrium and or a pooling equilibrium as well as sufficient conditions for every equilibrium of such a game to be pooling we also characterize all nonseparating equilibria and use this property to show that less information might be conveyed in any equilibrium of a verifiable message game than in some equilibrium of the cheap talk game with the same parameters

a spatial theory of news consumption and electoral competition we characterize the optimal editorial positions of the media in a model in which the media influence both voting behaviour and party policies political parties are less likely to choose partisan policies when more voters consume informative news when there are two media outlets each should be slightly biased relative to its audience in order to attract voters with relatively extreme views voter welfare is typically higher under a duopoly than under a monopoly two media outlets under joint ownership may provide more diverse viewpoints than two independent ones but voter welfare is not always higher copyright 2008 wiley blackwell