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Partisan segregation within the news audience buffers many Americans from countervailing political views, posing a risk to democracy. Empirical studies of the online media ecosystem suggest that only a small minority of Americans, driven by a mix of demand and algorithms, are siloed according to their political ideology. However, such research omits the comparatively larger television audience and often ignores temporal dynamics underlying news consumption. By analyzing billions of browsing and viewing events between 2016 and 2019, with a novel framework for measuring partisan audiences, we first estimate that 17% of Americans are partisan-segregated through television versus roughly 4% online. Second, television news consumers are several times more likely to maintain their partisan news diets month-over-month. Third, TV viewers’ news diets are far more concentrated on preferred sources. Last, partisan news channels’ audiences are growing even as the TV news audience is shrinking. Our results suggest that television is the top driver of partisan audience segregation among Americans.

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This study demonstrates how localization and homogenization can co-occur in different aspects of smartphone usage. Smartphones afford individualization of media behavior: users can begin, end, or switch between countless tasks anytime, but this individualization is shaped by shared environments such that smartphone usage may be similar among those who share such environments but contain differences, or localization, across environments or regions. Yet for all users, smartphone screen interactions are bounded and guided by nearly identical smartphone interfaces, suggesting that smartphone usage may be similar or homogenized across all individuals regardless of environment. We study homogenization and localization by comparing the temporal, visual, and experiential composition of screen activity among individuals in three dissimilar media environments—the United States, China, and Myanmar—using one week of screenshot data captured passively every 5 s by the novel Screenomics framework. We find that overall usage levels are consistently dissimilar across media environments, while metrics that depend more on moment-level decisions and user-interface design do not vary significantly across media environments. These results suggest that quantitative research on homogenization and localization should analyze behavior driven by user interfaces and by contextually determined parameters, respectively.

This paper investigates the impact of communication in a public good game with a central authority. The central authority includes a fixed cost that increases with the level of monitoring which in turn determines the level of deterrence. The level of monitoring is both exogenously and endogenously determined. Across three treatments subjects either have no opportunity to communicate, communicate only when the level of monitoring is exogenously imposed, or communicate only when the level of monitoring is endogenously selected. Results suggest that, in both treatments, average earnings are significantly higher with the opportunity to communicate. Most significantly, with the opportunity to communicate prior to endogenous selection, groups practically eliminate monitoring (imposing a low cost, nondeterrent, central authority), while maintaining a high level of contributions. Communication appears to make groups less dependent on institutional deterrence and allows them to reduce the costs of central authority.On the other hand, one significant disadvantage is that, unlike peer punishment, which is only costly when used, central authority regimes are costly regardless of observed behavior. For example, consider how speed limits are enforced. Groups at some level (town, county, or state), decide to collectively fund a police force to monitor the behavior of drivers. Regardless of behavior, deploying police officers is costly. Again, the literature suggests that groups understand this trade-off and selfimpose peer punishment whenever the central authority imposes a modest fixed cost (Markussen et al., 2013;Kamei et al., 2015).Beyond the role of institutions, researchers have also investigated the impact of communication on cooperation. While the importance of communication in establishing cooperation is intuitive, standard economic theory predicts that non-binding communication will have no impact on behavior (Olson, 1965). However, communication has been shown to have strong, and robust, positive effects on the level of cooperation in social dilemmas (Sally, 1995). While the reasons for communications' success remain debated there is largely consensus around two prominent mechanisms: fostering group identity and eliciting credible commitments to cooperate (Mendelberg, 2002;Bicchieri, 2002).In the CPR games devised by Ostrom et al. (1992), the combination of communication and peer punishment most effectively increased earnings. Ostrom et al. (1992) find that this combination was effective because communication allowed groups to develop, and credibly commit to, welfare-improving strategies that enhanced cooperation and reduced the instances of misplaced punishment. 5 In the public goods literature, the interaction of communication and peer punishment has been shown to be similarly effective (Bochet et al., 2006).In the design implemented here, the deterrence is manipulated by altering the probability that the central authority observes a subject's contribution, holding the magnitude of punishment constant. The fixed cos...