Related papers: Influential News and Policy-making
We study the welfare effects of overreaction to information in the form of diagnostic expectations in markets with asymmetric information, and the effect of a simple intervention in the form of a tax or a subsidy. A large enough level of…
While it is often assumed that searching for information to evaluate misinformation will help identify false claims, recent work suggests that search behaviours can instead reinforce belief in misleading news, particularly when users…
I study a model of costly Bayesian persuasion by a privately and partially informed sender who conducts a public experiment. The cost of running an experiment is the expected reduction of a weighted log-likelihood ratio function of the…
Misinformation poses a growing global threat to institutional trust, democratic stability, and public decision-making. While prior research has often portrayed social media as a channel for spreading falsehoods, less is known about the…
In this article, we study the effect of vector-valued interventions in votes under a binary voter model, where each voter expresses their vote as a $0-1$ valued random variable to choose between two candidates. We assume that the outcome is…
One of the most pressing challenges in the digital media landscape is understanding the impact of biases on the news sources that people rely on for information. Biased news can have significant and far-reaching consequences, influencing…
Content that drives engagement need not be the same content that drives willingness to pay. We study how polarizing content affects engagement (time on site) and commitment (subscriptions and retention) on a major news platform. We measure…
We study the effects of introducing information inefficiency in a model for a random linear economy with a representative consumer. This is done by considering statistical, instead of classical, economic general equilibria. Employing two…
User interventions such as nudges, prebunking, and contextualization have been widely studied as countermeasures against misinformation, and shown to suppress individual users' sharing behavior. However, it remains unclear whether and to…
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…
Unlike traditional media, social media typically provides quantified metrics of how many users have engaged with each piece of content. Some have argued that the presence of these cues promotes the spread of misinformation. Here we…
This work analyses surprising elections, and attempts to quantify the notion of surprise in elections. A voter is surprised if their estimate of the winner (assumed to be based on a combination of the preferences of their social connections…
Over the past decade it has become evident that intentional disinformation in the political context -- so-called fake news -- is a danger to democracy. However, until now there has been no clear understanding of how to define fake news,…
The spread of disinformation on social platforms is harmful to society. This harm may manifest as a gradual degradation of public discourse; but it can also take the form of sudden dramatic events such as the 2021 insurrection on Capitol…
Users rely on search engines for information in critical contexts, such as public health emergencies. Understanding how users evaluate the trustworthiness of search results is therefore essential. Research has identified rank and the…
When considering a specific event, news that accurately reflects the ground truth is deemed as real information, while news that deviates from the ground truth is classified as false information. False information often spreads fast due to…
A sender with private preferences would like to influence a receiver's action by providing information through a statistical test. The technology for information production is controlled by a monopolist intermediary, who offers a menu of…
Social choice functions help aggregate individual preferences while differentially private mechanisms provide formal privacy guarantees to release answers of queries operating on sensitive data. However, preserving differential privacy…
To reach a broader audience and optimize traffic toward news articles, media outlets commonly run social media accounts and share their content with a short text summary. Despite its importance of writing a compelling message in sharing…
Traditional media outlets are known to report political news in a biased way, potentially affecting the political beliefs of the audience and even altering their voting behaviors. Many researchers focus on automatically detecting and…