Research

This paper tests how awareness of media bias affects news consumers’ reactions to potentially biased news. We propose that news consumers’ tendency to repost news articles whose political inclination is inconsistent with the media outlet’s general ideology is an indicator of their strategic responses to news. By combining data from Chinese microblog users and an online experiment that exogenously varies whether news sources are revealed, we find that Microblog users are more likely to repost inconsistent news, an indication of strategic reaction to media bias. We also show that simply reminding people of media bias can raise their awareness and change their reactions to news.

Social media, on which signals are often correlated, has become a primary source of information. How do people form beliefs when reading correlated signals online? In a field experiment on Weibo, we exposed Chinese college students to redundant negative posts about civil service jobs. Consequently, they developed a 0.16 standard deviation more negative view of these jobs and were 11% less likely to register for civil service exams, compared to the control group. Our study demonstrates that correlation neglect can affect beliefs and real-life outcomes, including career choice.

People tend to withhold advice if they are worried about being blamed for their advice, which deters the spread of valuable information. We conduct a lab experiment with a two-by-two design that randomly varies whether punishment by advisees and messages from advisors are allowed, to explore whether and by how much blame concerns deter advice-giving. We first document that both monetary costs (punishment) and psychological costs (guilt) deter advice-giving and estimate the relative magnitude of these two costs that come from potential blame. We find that overall, monetary costs outweigh psychological costs. However, there is an obvious gender difference: male advisors place higher weight on monetary costs while female advisors care more about psychological costs. We also investigate the effectiveness of messages on advising and again find gender heterogeneity: messages reduce the perceived probability and amount of punishment, which greatly alleviates monetary concerns and leads to a higher advising rate for male advisors, but not for female advisors.

We partner with a large garment manufacturing firm in Tanzania to study how workers perceive and respond to discretion in the workplace. We are currently running a series of experiments that exogenously increase the meritocracy of the firm’s compensation and promotion processes to study the effects of discretion and meritocracy on labor supply.