This paper investigates how informative media affect political accountability and policy. I first present a baseline model of how informative media affects political accountability. The model is used to discuss the welfare consequences of private provision of news. It shows how media regulation and public broadcasting may correct market failures, notably, the under-provision of news. The model ...

The link between affect, defined as the capacity for sentimental arousal on the part of a message, and virality, defined as the probability that it be sent along, is of significant theoretical and practical importance, e.g. for viral marketing. A quantitative study of emailing of articles from the NY Times (Berger and Milkman, 2010) finds a strong link between positive affect and virality, and,...

Social media users have finite attention which limits the number of incoming messages from friends they can process. Moreover, they pay more attention to opinions and recommendations of some friends more than others. In this paper, we propose LA-LDA, a latent topic model which incorporates limited, non-uniformly divided attention in the diffusion process by which opinions and information spread...

Users increasingly inform themselves of the latest news through online news services. This is further accentuated by the increasingly seamless integration of social network platforms such as Twitter and Facebook into news websites, allowing easy content sharing and distribution. This makes online social network platforms of particular interest to news providers. For instance, online news produc...

Whether they are modeling bookmarking behavior in Flickr or cascades of failure in large networks, models of diffusion often start with the assumption that a few nodes start long chain reactions, resulting in large-scale cascades. While reasonable under some conditions, this assumption may not hold for social media networks, where user engagement is high and information may enter a system from ...

BACKGROUND People are increasingly interested in health news. As a mass media, the 'Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting' (IRIB) has the highest number of target audiences. In Iran, some people follow health news via health programs on satellites and other means of communication. However, all of these programs do not live up to the standards of scientific evidence. In this study, we examined T...