Ingar Haaland, Norwegian School of Economics (NHH)

News Customization with AI

Abstract

News outlets compete for engagement rather than reader satisfaction, leading to persistent mismatches between consumer demand and the supply of news. We test whether offering people the opportunity to customize the news can address this mismatch by unbundling presentation from coverage. In our AI-powered news app, users can customize article characteristics, such as the complexity of the writing or the extent of opinion, while holding the underlying news event constant. Using rich news consumption data from large-scale field experiments, we uncover substantial heterogeneity in news preferences. While a significant fraction of users demand politically aligned news, the vast majority of users display a high and persistent demand for less opinionated and more fact-driven news. Customization also leads to a better match between the news consumed and stated preferences, increasing news satisfaction.

Ingar Haaland is Professor in the Department of Economics at the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH). He received his PhD from NHH in 2019 and spent three years at the University of Bergen before returning to NHH in 2022.

He uses experimental methods, such as information provision experiments, to study economic behavior across different domains, including political economy, household finance, and macroeconomic expectation formation. He has recently become very interested in using AI tools for economic research.  

He is the principal investigator of a Researcher Project for Young Talents grant from the Research Council of Norway (approx. $750,000) that will examine media bias and political polarization (with Felix Chopra and Christopher Roth).

You can read more about Ingar Haaland here.

CEBI contact: Ida Maria Hartmann & Simon Kyllebæk Andersen.