Politically Correct Information Adoption

Abstract

This paper analyses the case when the political struggle not is channeled through policy choices, but through what information to adopt. The paper presents a simple model to analyze collective decisions of adopting new information when different parties' payoffs are contingent upon the new information. In equilibrium we demonstrate that the adopted information is biased towards “political correctness” rather than being informative (in the Blackwell sense). These results may be relevant when designing decision mechanisms for institutions that are to be keen on new information.Informativeness; Majority Rule; Political Correctness