Information search, behavioural economics, and relevance decisions in the online media industry: how strongly do the algorithms of intermediaries influence the relevance evaluation of information?

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ABSTRACT The study compares several information services offered by Internet intermediaries. The hypotheses deal with the influence of a gatekeeper’s relevance assessment service on a consumer’s decision-making. The empirical findings provide a taxonomy of decisive attribute levels and their part-worth utilities which affect consumers’ decisions. From this, media management recommendations can be derived. Some findings may be worrying for media management. For example, search engines will increase the competitive pressure on journalistic media the better they provide personalised search results. However, the results also indicate that users’ search behaviours open up a large field for media companies’ brand-driven distribution strategies. This is possible because almost half of search engines’ search queries are by brand name or media label. The weakness of media companies is revealed above all in the field of advertising. Nonetheless, media companies are still highly competitive due to their journalistic potential. In view of the research results, media industries should modify their business models in such a way that they integrate more of the superior characteristics, compared with the algorithms of well-known Internet intermediaries, into their editorial journalistic work.