Media reporting of natural disasters and its impact on disaster relief

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Natural disasters result in immense costs for a society in terms of the loss of individual lives, physical and mental injuries, emergency measures, and the reconstruction of physical capital. Since no market mechanism works well enough to cover those costs and the governments of the countries hit by disaster are often overwhelmed by costs and challenges, international solidarity is often requested by affected countries. Media reporting of disasters is biased towards certain disasters and countries (Strömberg 2007). Given that information and framing affect individual decisions (see, among others, Andreoni 1995; Tversky and Kahneman 1981), the media likely affects the willingness of governments and publics to provide relief (Eisensee and Strömberg 2007).The project aims at (1) identifying media bias in coverage of natural disasters. Our measure of media bias will include articles counts, their length or timing of reports, as well as the content of the articles; (2) understanding the behavioral responses to this content (measures) both by the governments and by the public who choose whether and to what extent to support people and regions affected by disasters; (3) providing an estimate of the level of misallocation of funds resulting from media bias and potentially amplified by individual/governmental responses to this bias. The results of this project should help us to learn how to overcome related biases and gain more objectivity in choices not only in this specific domain but in much broader contexts including politics and other economic choices.