
The briq scholarship program supports about 25 Ph.D. students at the Bonn Graduate School of Economics. Some of them are directly involved in briq research activities. In a series of short portraits, the briq newsroom introduces our student fellows and what they do. One of them is Felix Chopra, who has been at briq since October 2016.
What are your main research interests?
My current research focuses mostly on improving our understanding of media markets and how media content shapes people’s beliefs, preferences and behavior. From print news to social media, people receive a substantial amount of information from the media. We learn about politics or the state of the economy from the news; about cultural norms, values and stereotypes from the behavior of movie characters and the opinions people express online. Research has shown that such media exposure can affect people’s decisions in many domains such as voting, gender attitudes or consumption. That’s why I think understanding the demand and supply of media content is an exciting topic to work on.
How does your research fit in?
For example, in a current project with Ingar Haaland and Chris Roth, we examine whether the desire for more information is people’s dominant motive for reading economic and political news. In our experiment, we vary people’s beliefs about the informativeness of a newspaper and study how their demand for news from this outlet responds to these changes. If people value more informative news, policies designed to increase competition should improve the quality of the press because they increase the incentives to deliver the product that consumers want. However, if people want to read news that align with their political views, the consequences of such policies are more difficult to predict.
And what do you find?
Behavioral motives other than the desire for more information play an important role in shaping news consumption.
In the experiment, people who learn that a newspaper is more informative reduce their demand for news. Moreover, in a separate experiment we show that learning that a newspaper is more likely to make false claims in its political reporting does not decrease people’s demand for news from this outlet. This suggests that behavioral motives other than the desire for more information play an important role in shaping news consumption.
How has briq contributed to your research?
I think the greatest benefit is that we have many outstanding researchers visit briq all year round. This is a great opportunity to discuss research ideas and start collaborations. In fact, I met one of my co-authors while he was visiting briq.