Media reporting of natural disasters and its impact on disaster relief

自然灾害在个人生命损失、身体和精神伤害、紧急措施和物质资本重建方面给社会造成了巨大的代价。由于没有一种市场机制能够很好地弥补这些成本，而且受灾国家的政府往往被各种成本和挑战压得喘不过气来，因此受灾国家往往要求国际社会声援。媒体对灾害的报道偏向于某些灾害和国家(Strömberg，2007年)。鉴于信息和框架影响个人决策(除其他外，见Andreoni 1995；Tversky和Kahneman 1981)，媒体可能会影响政府和公众提供救济的意愿(Eisensee和Strömberg，2007)。该项目旨在(1)确定媒体在报道自然灾害方面的偏见。我们对媒体偏向的衡量标准将包括文章数量、报道的长度或时机以及文章的内容；(2)了解政府和公众对这些内容的行为反应(措施)，他们选择是否以及在多大程度上支持受灾害影响的人和地区；(3)提供对媒体偏向造成的资金不当分配程度的估计，并可能被个人/政府对这种偏向的反应放大。该项目的成果应有助于我们学习如何克服相关的偏见，不仅在这一具体领域而且在包括政治和其他经济选择在内的更广泛的背景下，在选择上获得更多的客观性。

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.