Luca Braghieri
Luca Braghieri
Associate Professor
Department of Decision Sciences
Bocconi University
I am also affiliated with NHH, CEPR, CESifo, IGIER, and BELSS.
I am a board member of the Review of Economic Studies (REStud).
Most of my work is in political economy, with a focus on the media market.
Published Papers
Political Correctness, Social Image, and Information Transmission
American Economic Review, Vol. 114, No. 12, pp. 3877–3904, 2024
A prominent argument in the political correctness debate is that people feel pressure to publicly espouse sociopolitical views they do not privately hold, and that such misrepresentations might render public discourse less vibrant and informative. This paper formalizes the argument in terms of social image and evaluates it experimentally in the context of college campuses. The results show that (i) social image concerns drive a wedge between the sensitive sociopolitical attitudes that college students report in private and in public; (ii) public utterances are indeed less informative than private utterances; and (iii) information loss is exacerbated by (partial) audience naivete.
Civil Liberties in Times of Crisis
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Vol. 15, No. 4, pp. 389–421, 2023
We study people’s willingness to trade off civil liberties for increased health security in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic by deploying representative surveys involving around 550,000 responses across 15 countries. We document significant heterogeneity across groups in willingness to sacrifice rights: citizens disadvantaged by income, education, or race are less willing to sacrifice rights than their more advantaged peers in every country.
The Health of Democracies During the Pandemic: Results from a Randomized Survey Experiment
AEA Papers and Proceedings, Vol. 113, pp. 572–576, 2023
Concerns have been raised about the demise of democracy, possibly accelerated by pandemic-related restrictions. Using a survey experiment involving 8,206 respondents from 5 Western democracies, we find that subjects randomly exposed to information regarding civil liberties infringements undertaken by China and South Korea to contain COVID-19 became less willing to sacrifice rights and more worried about their long-term erosion.
Social Media and Mental Health
American Economic Review, Vol. 112, No. 11, pp. 3660–3693, 2022
We provide quasi-experimental estimates of the impact of social media on mental health by leveraging a unique natural experiment: the staggered introduction of Facebook across US colleges. Our analysis couples data on student mental health around the years of Facebook’s expansion with a generalized difference-in-differences empirical strategy. We find that the rollout of Facebook at a college had a negative impact on student mental health. It also increased the likelihood with which students reported experiencing impairments to academic performance due to poor mental health. Additional evidence on mechanisms suggests the results are due to Facebook fostering unfavorable social comparisons.
A Theory of Chosen Preferences
American Economic Review, Vol. 111, No. 2, pp. 720–754, 2021
We propose and develop a dynamic theory of endogenous preference formation in which people adopt worldviews that shape their judgments about their experiences. The framework highlights the role of mindset flexibility, a trait that determines the relative weights the decision-maker places on her current and anticipated worldviews when evaluating future outcomes. The theory generates rich behavioral dynamics, thereby illuminating a wide range of applications and providing potential explanations for a variety of observed phenomena.
The Welfare Effects of Social Media
American Economic Review, Vol. 110, No. 3, pp. 629–676, 2020
The rise of social media has provoked both optimism about potential societal benefits and concern about harms such as addiction, depression, and political polarization. In a randomized experiment, we find that deactivating Facebook for the four weeks before the 2018 US midterm election reduced online activity while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends. Deactivation also reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization, increased subjective well-being, and caused a large persistent reduction in post-experiment Facebook use.
Working Papers
Article-level Slant and Polarization in News Consumption on Social Media
Revise and Resubmit, American Economic Review, 2025
How polarized is news consumption on social media? We fine-tune a large-language-model to assign a content-based measure of slant to the near-universe of hard-news articles published online by the top 100 U.S. outlets in 2019. We find that polarized news consumption on Facebook, defined as the difference in the average slant of articles consumed by Republicans and Democrats on the platform, is arguably high. We identify pro-attitudinal news consumption within outlets as a crucial mechanism. Analyzing the distribution of slant on the production side, we find that 67% of the article-level variation in slant is within rather than across outlets.
Threshold Disclosure in Collective Decisions
Working Paper, 2026
Voting-based collective decisions are typically made either anonymously or publicly. Anonymous voting protects truthful expression but conceals individual behavior; public voting provides information about individual votes, but, when one option is socially stigmatized, it can distort participation and choices. We introduce threshold majority voting, in which voters choose a disclosure threshold determining whether and when their votes are revealed. In an experiment at UC Berkeley on the participation of transgender women in women’s sports, public voting nearly doubles abstention and reduces support for the stigmatized option. Threshold voting eliminates these distortions while revealing one-third of individual votes.
Frictions in News Consumption: Evidence from Social Media
Working Paper, 2026
We study the drivers of like-minded and low-reliability news-following on social media, as well as the effectiveness of interventions targeting them. In a five-week field experiment with more than 3,000 U.S. Facebook users, we document the importance of salience-based behavioral frictions in shaping users’ news portfolios on the platform. Guided by a theoretical framework, the experiment varies: (i) whether participants are prompted to re-optimize the portfolio of news pages they follow on Facebook through a platform-integrated interface that increases the salience of a balanced set of news outlets, and (ii) whether they receive personalized information about outlet slant and reliability. We find that, consistent with our salience model and in contrast to canonical models of news demand, the re-optimization interface with a salient menu of news pages induces large portfolio changes even without the provision of information; conversely, the provision of information has no effect unless paired with the re-optimization interface. Our interventions produce two main implications for users’ news portfolios. First, they move users’ portfolios closer to their stated preferences, mitigating internalities. Second, they reduce the slant and increase the reliability of users’ portfolios, thus potentially mitigating negative externalities for democracy. The induced portfolio changes persist for more than a month, translate into measurable changes in online news consumption, and are unlikely to be driven by experimentation motives or experimenter demand effects.
Talking across the Aisle
Working Paper, 2025
We conduct an experiment in which U.S. Democrats and Republicans engage in naturalistic video conversations about policy-relevant facts. We investigate self-selection into politically homogeneous interactions and how these interactions affect information aggregation and affective polarization. Participants exhibit a preference against cross-partisan conversations, explained by lower expectations about their informational and hedonic value. Indeed, participants find it significantly more difficult to extract knowledge from counter-partisans and, thus, tend to learn less from them. In contrast, cross-partisan interactions prove more enjoyable than anticipated and lastingly reduce affective polarization. Overall, cross-partisan contact may better serve to reduce affective polarization than to improve information aggregation.
Learning from the Past: How History Education Shapes Support for Extreme Ideology
Working Paper, 2025
Can teaching the history of authoritarian regimes built on extreme ideology lastingly reduce support for those ideologies? We leverage a natural experiment in Germany where the senior high school history curriculum exogenously alternated covering, across cohorts, the communist German Democratic Republic and fascist Nazi Germany. Data collected a decade post-graduation reveals that studying the GDR rather than the Nazi regime increases knowledge about the GDR and reduces support for extreme left-wing ideology. The treatment does not increase support for extreme right-wing ideology on average, but does so in more right-leaning regions, highlighting substitutabilities of the production function of extreme ideology.
Biased Decoding and the Foundations of Communication
CESifo Working Paper No. 10432, 2023
One-way communication between an informed sender and an uninformed receiver involves two fundamental processes: a process of encoding – whereby the sender maps states of the world or concepts into arbitrary signals – and a process of decoding – whereby the receiver makes inferences about the state of the world conditional on each signal realization. In this paper, I develop machinery to study the process of decoding for an agent who might have inaccurate beliefs about the information environment (a biased decoder) and show how such machinery can help shed light on foundational aspects of communication.
Work in Progress
Children and Smartphones (with Sarah Eichmeyer, Paolo Falco)
Children and Smartphones (with Sarah Eichmeyer, Matthew Gentzkow, Ruru Hoong, Angela Yuson Lee)
Disagreeing (with Francesco Bilotta, Collin Raymond, Mark Whitmeyer)
Laid to Rest
Targeted Advertising and Price Discrimination in Intermediated Online Markets
Democratic Institutions, Reciprocity, and Prosocial Behavior