演講者簡介 : Mr. Chen-Yu Pan will receive his Ph.D. in Economics from Boston College, in 2014. His research focuses on Political Economy, Public Economics and Urban Economics.
演講摘要 : In this paper I present a two-party election model with media noise. The media may provide polarized messages instead of those that explain the actual policies of parties'. The rational voter relies on media as an imperfect information source about the party's platform. Given this framework, I show that the Downsian policy convergence does not hold. Moreover, when the party's ideology is relatively strong and the media bias is significant, one-sided polarization can happen: the party with more imprecise reports may adopt a more extreme strategy while his opponent always being more of a centralist in a perfect Bayesian equilibrium. This occurs when a party is misrepresented more often, causing the voter to think that the other party has more incentive polarize. Therefore, the voter may tend to vote for the highly misrepresented party. This change in voting behavior gives the increasingly misrepresented party more room to polarize. I also show that parties never gain from these increasing misrepresentations and a biased media environment can negatively affect the voter's welfare. My results suggest that the public should pursue a balanced media rather than a precise one.
