Related papers: Competition, Politics, & Social Media
Practical news feed platforms generate a hybrid list of news articles and advertising items (e.g., products, services, or information) and many platforms optimize the position of news articles and advertisements independently. However, they…
Misinformation proliferates in the online sphere, with evident impacts on the political and social realms, influencing democratic discourse and posing risks to public health and safety. The corporate world is also a prime target for fake…
The proliferation of information disseminated by public/social media has made decision-making highly challenging due to the wide availability of noisy, uncertain, or unverified information. Although the issue of uncertainty in information…
I present evidence that communication between marketplace participants is an important influence on market demand. I find that consumer demand is approximately equally influenced by communication on both formal and informal networks-…
Ranking algorithms play a crucial role in online platforms ranging from search engines to recommender systems. In this paper, we identify a surprising consequence of popularity-based rankings: the fewer the items reporting a given signal,…
Communication plays a major role in social systems. Effective communications, which requires transmission of the messages between individuals without disruptions or noise, can be a powerful tool to deliver intended impact. Language and…
Media outlets and political campaigners recognise social media as a means for widely disseminating news and opinions. In particular, Twitter is used by political groups all over the world to spread political messages, engage their…
Persistent inequalities in political knowledge are a central concern in political communication. We organize the mechanisms underlying the knowledge-gap literature by distinguishing between individual preconditions, structural features of…
Mass Media outlets have occupied the central role of the political scenario, and are persuasive in the process of opinion formation of the citizens. In particular, the study of the relationship between Mass Media and behaviour of citizens…
Social scientists have long sought to understand why certain people, items, or options become more popular than others. One seemingly intuitive theory is that inherent value drives popularity. An alternative theory claims that popularity is…
Industrial policy has returned to the centre of economic governance, particularly in the high-tech sectors where positive network externalities in demand make market dominance self-reinforcing. This paper studies the welfare effects of an…
Digital communication has made the public discourse considerably more complex, and new actors and strategies have emerged as a result of this seismic shift. Aside from the often-studied interactions among individuals during opinion…
Social media, such as blogs, are often seen as democratic entities that allow more voices to be heard than the conventional mass or elite media. Some also feel that social media exhibits a balancing force against the arguably slanted elite…
This paper provides a simple theoretical framework to evaluate the effect of key parameters of ranking algorithms, namely popularity and personalization parameters, on measures of platform engagement, misinformation and polarization. The…
An individual's opinion concerning political bias in the media is shaped by exogenous factors (independent analysis of media outputs) and endogenous factors (social activity, e.g. peer pressure by political allies and opponents in a…
Politicians with large media visibility and social media audiences have a significant influence on public discourse. Consequently, their dissemination of misinformation can have profound implications for society. This study investigated the…
Analyses of voting algorithms often overlook informational externalities shaping individual votes. For example, pre-polling information often skews voters towards candidates who may not be their top choice, but who they believe would be a…
Online political advertisements have become an important element in electoral campaigning throughout the world. At the same time, concepts such as disinformation and manipulation have emerged as a global concern. Although these concepts are…
We study the effects of allowing paid prioritization arrangements in a market with content provider (CP) competition. We consider competing CPs who pay prioritization fees to a monopolistic ISP so as to offset the ISP's cost for investing…
Many recent political events, like the 2016 US Presidential elections or the 2018 Brazilian elections have raised the attention of institutions and of the general public on the role of Internet and social media in influencing the outcome of…