Demand for Online News, Inertia, and Misperceptions

Last registered on January 29, 2025

View Trial History

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title

Demand for Online News, Inertia, and Misperceptions

RCT ID

AEARCTR-0014392

Initial registration date

September 19, 2024

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published

September 25, 2024, 11:47 AM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Last updated

January 29, 2025, 8:01 AM EST

Last updated is the most recent time when changes to the trial's registration were published.

Locations

Country

United States of America

Region

Primary Investigator

Name

Luca Braghieri

Affiliation

Bocconi University

Contact Primary Investigator

Other Primary Investigator(s)

Additional Trial Information

Status

On going

Start date

2025-01-14

End date

2025-12-31

Keywords

Behavior, Crime, Violence, & Conflict

Additional Keywords

JEL code(s)

Secondary IDs

Prior work

This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.

Abstract

We plan a large-scale field experiment to investigates the degree to which the consumption of partisan and low-quality news on Facebook depends on behavioral factors such inertia in decision making and misperceptions about news outlet slant and quality. The experiment is designed to test whether interventions targeting these factors can improve the quality and reduce the partisanship of news consumed on Facebook.

External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation

Braghieri, Luca. 2025. "Demand for Online News, Inertia, and Misperceptions." AEA RCT Registry. January 29. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.14392-1.1

Sponsors & Partners

Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)

Intervention (Hidden)

Intervention Start Date

2025-01-30

Intervention End Date

2025-04-30

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)

The primary outcomes are described in detail in the attached pre-analysis-plan document.

In short, we will consider the following primary outcomes.
- The participants’ incentivized perceptions of the slant and quality of various news outlets, including those they follow on Facebook.
- The set of news pages that participants follow on Facebook at various points in the experiment.
- Each participant's bliss point in a two dimensional space where one dimension captures the average slant of the participant's news consumption portfolio on Facebook, measured using the scale from Bakshy, Messing, and Adamic (2015), and the other dimension captures the average quality of the portfolio, measured using the NewsGuard reliability ratings.
We will also calculate, for each participant and for both slant and quality, the distance between the participant's bliss point and the actual average slant or quality of the portfolio of news pages that the participant follows on Facebook.
News consumption data from the subset of participants who agreed to let the research team track their browsing behaviors on news websites.
News exposure using self reports. Specifically, we will ask participants about the average quality and slant of the news they saw on their Facebook feeds over the last four weeks.

Primary Outcomes (explanation)

See pre-analysis plan document

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)

Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

I filled out the "Experimental Design (Hidden)" category. I will make that category available after the end of the experiment.

Experimental Design Details

The intervention is described in detail in the attached pre-analysis-plan document.

In short, participants will be block-randomized into a control group and four primary treatment groups. The social media behavior of participants in the control group will not be interfered with. Members of the passive-choice-quality-info treatment group will only be given information about the quality of the various outlets that they follow on Facebook, as measured by the NewsGuard reliability ratings. The remaining three treatment groups will be asked to make an active choice about the news pages they follow on Facebook using a simple and user-friendly interface built into the survey. Specifically, participants in those treatment groups will be shown a set of news outlets, some of which they currently follow on Facebook and some of which they currently do not follow on Facebook, and will be asked which of them they would like to follow going forward. The outlets offered will span the spectrum of slant and quality. In the active-choice-no-info treatment, the re-optimization exercise will not be accompanied by any information; in the active-choice-slant-info treatment, participants will be given information about the slant of all the news outlets in the re-optimization task, along with slant information about the outlets they currently follow, using the measure from Baksy, Messing, and Adamic (2015); in the active-choice-quality-info treatment, participants will be given information about quality according to the NewsGuard ratings rather than slant. Our survey will interface automatically with Facebook so that, if a participant follows (unfollows) an outlet within the context of our survey, the participant will automatically follow (unfollow) that outlet also on Facebook.

Randomization Method

Randomization done by Qualtrics

Randomization Unit

Individual

Was the treatment clustered?

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters

We expect 3100 individuals to reach the randomization stage of our experiment (which happens in the second survey in our study). Fluctuating recruitment costs (we are recruiting through Facebook ads, whose price varies over time) and attrition between the first and second surveys will determine whether we overshoot or undershoot these numbers.

Sample size: planned number of observations

Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms

We will randomize individuals whose browsing behavior we are not able to track equally across the 6 treatment arms described in the pre-analysis plan. We will randomize individuals whose browsing behavior we are able to track into only 4 of the treatment arms: the control group, the active-choice-no-info group, the active-choice-slant-info group, and the active-choice-quality-info groups. See the pre-analysis plan for details about the design.

It is hard to forecast the number of people who will allow us to track their browsing behavior, but we estimate it to be around 1000.

Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)

Supporting Documents and Materials

IRB