This study investigates the effects of variation in "congeniality" of news on Facebook user engagement (likes, shares, and comments). We compile an original data set of Facebook posts by 84 German news outlets on politicians that were investigated for criminal offenses from January 2012 to June...

Three concepts from psychology -- cognitive dissonance, motivated reasoning, and confirmation bias -- are perhaps surprisingly closely related, and have been used productively in a variety of fields in economics, more so over time. These concepts are relevant to the field of industrial...

The hot hand bias is the widely documented bias toward overestimation of positive serial correlation in sequential events. We test for the hot hand bias in a novel real-world context, NCAA basketball tournament seeds. That is, we examine whether teams that perform relatively well heading into...

Most studies of Bayesian updating use experimental data. This paper uses a non-experimental data source--the voter ballots of the Associated Press (AP) college football poll, a weekly subjective ranking of the top 25 teams--to test Bayes' rule as a descriptive model. I find that voters sometimes...

Opportunity cost is considered to be a fundamental concept in economics. But the definition of the term continues to be controversial. I describe how the term is widely used in two distinct ways, both in the academic and non-academic literatures. I propose a practical way for educators to...

I analyze a simple model of the market for news in which consumers and reporters both misinterpret information ideologically and have biased beliefs about the extent to which others misinterpret information. I show that for some parameter values, in equilibrium: i) a monopolist media outlet...

This paper analyzes a simple model of policy making under uncertainty in the presence of an interest group that may fund and lobby research. In the model, if research is not disclosed via lobbying it enters the public domain, and subsequently is randomly observed by the policy maker....

Numerous scientists and public policy analysts have speculated that U.S. research funding agencies favored grant applicants who promoted, or at least were not publicly skeptical of, the threat posed by anthropogenic climate change. I use the Oregon Petition, a publicly observable measure of...