Media competition and information disclosure

This paper analyzes an election game where self-interested politicians can exploit the lack of information that citizens have about candidates’ preferred policies in order to pursue their own agendas. In such a setup, we analyze the incentives of newspapers to acquire costly information and that of politicians to make informative speeches, as well as how competition among the media affects such incentives. We show that the higher the number of potential readers and/or the lower the cost of investigating, the more the candidates tend to reveal their motives. We also show that the readers’ purchasing habits play a crucial role in the model. More specifically, we show that if readers always buy a newspaper, media competition favors information disclosure; whereas if they are opportunistic and just buy a newspaper in case news are uncovered, competition is not so desirable. An erratum to this article can be found at     

Authenticity and the disclosure of the information preserve: The case of adoptive parenthood

This paper explores the processes whereby people disclose information that is potentially stigmatizing but relatively inaccessible to others as a tactic to maintain personal authenticity. This general issue is examined by investigating how 71 infertile adoptive mothers manage information about adoption within and outside the family. Attention is also given to the codes of conduct regarding adoption advocated by professionals and their relevance for disclosure of a potentially stigmatizing attribute. Respondents acknowledge differences in their families in public (as advised by practitioners), but covertly reject difference by disavowing deviance. Thus, adhering to professional codes for achieving authenticity appears to create, instead, a personal sense of inauthenticity. The relevance of the disclosure of private information for a sense of personal authenticity is considered in other areas of social life.This research was supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and from the Government of Ontario.     

Stealing thunder: Analysis of the effects of proactive disclosure of crisis information

An organization has several options when releasing information about a crisis. These options include the use of various types of explanations and justifications for the crisis as well as the timing of information release. An experiment investigated a self-disclosure strategy called “stealing thunder.” When an organization steals thunder, it breaks the news about its own crisis before the crisis is discovered by the media or other interested parties. Stealing thunder in a crisis situation, as opposed to allowing the information to be first disclosed by another party, was found to result in higher credibility ratings. A path analysis also linked stealing thunder and previous involvement with the organization and product to perceptions of the crisis as less severe and to higher levels of intent to purchase the product involved in the crisis.     

Family Dilemmas and Secrets: parents' disclosure of information to their adult offspring with learning disabilities

This paper describes the role parents play in providing knowledge of learning disability to their adult offspring with learning disabilities. Data were derived from an in-depth qualitative study of the nature of parent-adult-offspring co-residence. The findings reveal that while parents recognised and had to deal with the stigma learning disability exerted in their own lives, they had taken steps to prevent their adult offspring from having to deal with similar difficulties. It is argued that it remains the case that learning disability is treated as a stigmatised identity and as such is rendered invisible through the strategic control of information. However, findings point towards the conclusion that there has been a cultural reversal in how this process is managed.     

Media and information praxis of young activists in the Umbrella Movement

Young people were key participants in the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong and the media also played an important role in this protest. This study examines how Hong Kong’s young activists developed communication strategies and media practices to mobilize this social movement. A framework termed “media and information praxis of social movements” is proposed for the analysis. The findings showed that in their praxis, the young activists used their media and information literacy skills to initiate, organize, and mobilize collective actions. They not only used social media and mobile networks but also traditional mass media and street booths in a holistic and integrated approach to receive and disseminate information. Hence, these young activists served as agents of mediatization. The results also indicated that the young activists moved away from the traditional movement mode which just tried to motivate a large number of people to protest in the streets. They actively engaged in the new movement mode, which emphasizes the media and information power game. Their praxis in the Umbrella Movement reflects the trend toward the mediatization of social movements in Hong Kong.     

新媒介环境下传媒与青少年社会化研究

本文对近十几年来国内有关传媒与青少年社会化问题的文献进行了系统回顾,归纳出研究现状和特点:网络和电视等电子媒介是研究的主要内容;研究集中于社会化的结果,缺乏对于青少年的认知机制如何影响其处理传媒的信息的过程研究;研究对象存在着明显的不平衡现象,且概念使用混乱;研究方法日趋多样,但缺乏大型、系统的实证研究。在此基础上,对今后研究的发展方向进行了预测和分析。     

Discovering parental drug dependence: silence and disclosure1

Children of drug dependent parents form a large and growing population at elevated risk of adverse developmental and social outcomes. In this study 36 children and young people described growing up in such families. Parents tried to shield children from exposure, however the majority of young people demonstrated a detailed awareness of their parents' problem with drugs whilst living with the parentally imposed fiction that drugs were not at the heart of their family dynamic. Children and young people are locked into a silence they find difficult to unburden to anyone. The policy imperative is recognition of the impact on children of living daily with parental drug dependence and means of ameliorating their living circumstances in ways that do not label them further.     

Changing methods of disclosure. Literature review of disclosure to children with terminal illnesses,including HIV

More than 30 years after the first discovery of the deadly HIV virus, and in the wake of increased knowledge of transmission, treatment and behavioral intervention development, parents are still faced with the difficult task of whether, when and how to inform their child about her or his HIV status. Except for some general ethical considerations, there are no national or international guidelines available for handling HIV status disclosure to a child by parents and health professionals. Most studies on disclosure address the problem of stigma and the barriers to disclosure of HIV-positive status by adults to their sexual partners, caretakers, families and communities, but very few studies focus on disclosure to HIV-positive children. The majority of the studies that address disclosure to children limit themselves to stipulating reasons for barriers to such disclosure instead of the skills and knowledge necessary for effective disclosure to a child. Increasing availability of therapy for HIV across the world presses the issue of disclosure to the child. Even so, disclosure for children who are HIV-positive due to vertical transmission continues to be very difficult. There is a lack of interventions that consider guidelines for healthcare professionals, parents or persons involved with taking care of HIV-positive children. These interventions should be designed in an understanding manner towards the culture where they might be implemented and be as appropriate in the view of integrating different family structures and the child's development.     

Children of open marriages: Parental disclosure and perspectives

This study concerns parents in open relationships and their disclosures of information to their children. In this sampling of seventy-one adults, 50 percent had children and each of them responded to questions concerning their open relationships and their children's awareness and involvement in these open relationships. Seventy-five percent wanted their children to be aware of their lifestyle. However, only 21 percent fully informed their children as to their involvements.James Watson is a senior psychology student at Metropolitan State College. During his years as a student he has developed a particular interest in alternative lifestyles and children of these alternatives. Mary Ann Watson received her Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1969. She is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Metropolitan State College in Denver, is a Psychologist in private practice, and is codirector of Open Learning Associates, a private organization providing professional and lay workshops. She is coauthor ofBreaking The Bonds: The Realities Of Sexually Open Relationships (Tudor Press, Denver, CO).     

Experiences of disclosure of childhood sexual abuse and psychopathology

Reported child sexual abuse is associated with the development of anorexia and bulimia nervosa overall, but the mediating factors that determine whether such abuse is relevant in individual cases are not adequately understood. This study considers the importance of the experience of initial disclosure as a mediator in a case series of eating-disordered women. The extent of psychopathology (particularly the frequency of vomiting and the presence of the symptoms of borderline personality disorder) was associated with the nature of the perceived response to an attempted disclosure. A perceived lack of response or a negative, hostile response was associated with specific patterns of symptomatology. Further research is suggested to extend these conclusions, and the clinical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Compliance with ERISA’s disclosure provisions

A sample of large employee-benefit plan sponsors revealed that while respondents each paid plan consultants about $769,000 per year to help them comply with the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA), more than half did not comply with selected provisions of the law. Across the sample, differential levels of spending on compliance were not associated with the likelihood of compliance. Rather, benefit directors’ human capital as measured by years of experience, along with government audits, were the chief determinants of compliance. The presence of unions did not contribute to compliance with ERISA in the single employer plans studied herein, possibly because industrial unions, like plan sponsors, face information blockages. The author thanks Ann Bartel, Victor Goldberg, Frank Lichtenberg, Eli Noam. Donna Sockel, and Gene Martin. This article is derived from the author’s doctoral dissertation.     

Mobilizing ethnic competition

Ethnic competition theory provides a powerful explanation for ethnic conflict, by demonstrating how variation in ethnic mobilization relates to intergroup struggles over scarce resources. However, the tendency to capture such relationships at the aggregate level, through macro-level proxies of intergroup competition, offers little insight into the processes through which ethnic grievances mobilize into contentious action. This article integrates insights from the social movements literature to address how competitive contexts crystallize into broader conflicts. Drawing on data from the civil rights-era Ku Klux Klan??perhaps the quintessential case of contentious ethnic organization in the United States??the analysis focuses on the ways in which meso-level arrangements mediate the relationship between overarching competitive contexts and ethnic conflict. Results of a paired comparative analysis of KKK mobilization in Greensboro and Charlotte demonstrate that social and spatial relations within each city shaped the contours of perceived competition and subsequent ethnic organization in ways that were not always predictable through observation of conventional proxies of competition.     

Disability,identity and disclosure in the online dating environment

This paper examines how disabled people construct self-identity and negotiate disclosure of impairment in the online dating environment. Grounded theory was used to code and analyze 108 responses to an online open-ended questionnaire completed by disabled people who engaged in online dating. Findings reveal that while the body and impairment may not be present in digital space, it plays an important role in how disabled people present themselves online. This paper suggests that the embodied/disembodied dichotomy that has been traditionally used to distinguish offline and online interaction is blurred in the online dating environment.     

Yardstick competition and political agency problems

We examine how yardstick competition between jurisdictions affects the agency problem resulting from uncertainty about politicians (adverse selection) and their policies (moral hazard). We find that yardstick comparison can contribute both to disciplining and to selecting politicians.Earlier versions of this paper have circulated as Queen Mary Working Paper No. 444 and CORE Discussion Paper 2002/29. We would like to thank our editor, Maurice Salles, two anonymous referees, Mark Armstrong and Enrico Minelli for helpful comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank seminar participants at CORE, Queen Mary, Marseilles, and the 2002 Public Economic Theory conference, Université Paris 1.     

Status and welfare under monopolistic competition

This article departs from the traditional welfare analysis of social status seeking by incorporating scale economies, product differentiation, and monopolistic competition into a model. I argue that social status seeking could be welfare improving rather than the usual conclusion that social status seeking is welfare-reducing, under some assumptions that are not particularly strong. Market distortions of the quantity–variety and consumption–leisure trade-off may be corrected by social status seeking. Since modern societies are arguably closer to monopolistic competition than perfect competition, we may also need to rethink the long-held belief that the welfare effects caused by social status seeking are usually negative.     

Union rent seeking and import competition

conclusion We empirically evaluate two issues: (1) how the union rent seeking responds to import competition and (2) whether union bargaining power, as proxied by the proportion of the labor force in an industry that is unionized, moderates the impact of import com-petition on union wage differentials. Unlike other studies, our emphasis is on the influ-ence of import competition on union rent seeking, rather than on union wages per se. Our primary results indicate that while import competition negatively and significantly affects union rent seeking, the extent of unionization does not substantially influence the impact of import competition on the union wage differentials. This is a somewhat surprising result since the literature suggests that union wages are greater in the pres-ence of stronger unions.