Working Papers Media Competition and Information Disclosure

This paper analyzes an election game where self-interested politicians can exploit the lack of information that voters have about candidates ’ preferred policies in order to pursue their own agendas. In such a setup, we study the incentives of newspapers to acquire costly information, and how competition among the media affect such incentives. We show that the higher the number of potential readers and/or the lower the cost or investigating, the more the newspapers investigate. We also show that the readers ’ purchasing habits play a crucial role in the model. More specifically, we show that if the readers always buy a newspaper, media competition favors information disclosure; whereas if they just buy a newspaper in the case news are uncovered, competition is not so desirable. JEL classification: D72; D8