Jeremy Burke                                                          jmb11@duke.edu

Welcome to my webpage!  I am currently a PhD student in Economics at Duke University. Here is a link to my CV.  

Research Fields: Applied Microeconomic Theory, Political Economy, Industrial Organization

Areas of Interest: Information Economics, Media Bias, Voting

Research :  

Unfairly Balanced: Unbiased News Coverage and Information Loss  
A majority of Americans view news organizations as politically biased, creating a strong incentive for firms to try to present themselves as impartial. This paper argues that the desire to appear unbiased leads to information loss. In the formal model, firms withhold information in an effort to appear neutral. It is shown that information loss is exacerbated by competition, policies that regulate content are welfare reducing, and that regulating the size of the market can increase the amount of information revealed. Finally, the introduction of imperfectly informed sources of news, such as blogs, can decrease the incentives for traditional news outlets to provide information, yet they may also enhance welfare when information is being suppressed.

Primetime Spin: Media Bias and Belief Confirming Information Forthcoming: Journal of Economics and Management Strategy  
This paper develops a model of media bias in which rational agents acquire all their news from the source that is most likely to confirm their prior beliefs. Despite only wishing to make the correct decision, agents act as if they enjoy receiving news that supports their preconceptions. By exclusively gathering information from a source biased towards his prior, there is little chance an agent will be persuaded to change his mind. Moreover, it is shown that even an unbiased agent prefers to receive biased news as it is unlikely to produce conflicting reports. The media caters to the informational demands of consumers and accordingly slants its reporting. It is shown that competition may not decrease bias, but may actually enhance it. Finally, even when it increases bias, competition may improve welfare by expanding the market for news.

What's in a Poll? Incentives for Truthful Reporting in Pre-Election Opinion Surveys ( with Curtis Taylor ) Accepted subject to minor revisions: Public Choice  
We examine the ability of pre-election polls to aggregate information about voter preferences. We show that if the electorate is small and voting costs are negligible, then an equilibrium exists in which citizens report their true political preferences. If the electorate is large or voting costs are significant, however, then no such equilibrium exists because poll respondents possess incentives to influence the voting behavior of others by misreporting their true preferences. We find that when a truthful equilibrium does exist, a poll can raise expected welfare by discouraging turnout among members of the minority.