The Price of a Familiar Perspective

Georgy Lukyanov; Ilya Pototskiy

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arXiv · 2609.31752

The Price of a Familiar Perspective

Georgy Lukyanov·Ilya Pototskiy

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Abstract

Readers learn not only from a media source but also how to read it. We ask how this source-specific interpretive capital is priced when subscribers renew and whether transparency that travels across sources differs from feedback attached to past consumption. In a Gaussian model, familiarity raises the value of future reports at a diminishing rate and matters most at intermediate source expertise. Conditional on an inherited one-sided consumption history and terminal or myopic pricing, the better-understood source charges more, retains more of its returning cohort, and earns more from it. Symmetric public calibration and consumption-linked outcome feedback both improve consumer decisions but move competition in opposite directions. Calibration helps the unfamiliar source more and compresses the report-value advantage; feedback deepens understanding only of consumed content and expands it. Within the covered interior market and before implementation costs, feedback also raises gross renewal-period surplus. Public calibration may lower it only in a strongly concentrated returning cohort---where the familiar source initially serves more than four fifths---because readers are reallocated away from a source that remains more informative. What matters, therefore, is not simply how much transparency is produced, but whether it is portable across sources.

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Georgy Lukyanov, Ilya Pototskiy. 2026-09-23. The Price of a Familiar Perspective. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31752

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