Related papers: Influential News and Policy-making
A monopolist faces a partially uninformed population of consumers, interconnected through a directed social network. In the network, the monopolist offers rewards to informed consumers (influencers) conditional on informing uninformed…
The massive diffusion of social media fosters disintermediation and changes the way users are informed, the way they process reality, and the way they engage in public debate. The cognitive layer of users and the related social dynamics…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly shaping how information is created and disseminated, from companies using them to craft persuasive advertisements, to election campaigns optimizing messaging to gain votes, to social media…
How does the politician's reputation concern affect information provision when the information is endogenously provided by a biased lobbyist? I develop a model to study this problem and show that the answer depends on the transparency…
This paper studies a dynamic model of information acquisition, in which information might be secretly manipulated. A principal must choose between a safe action with known payoff and a risky action with uncertain payoff, favoring the safe…
Competition among news sources may encourage some sources to share fake news and misinformation to influence the public. While sharing misinformation may lead to a short-term gain in audience engagement, it may damage the reputation of…
This paper studies lying in a novel context. Previous work has focused on situations in which people are either fully aware of the economic consequences of all available actions (e.g., die-under-cup paradigm), or they are uncertain, but…
Fake news on Social Media undermines democratic institutions and processes. Especially since 2016, researchers from many disciplines have focussed on ways to address the phenomenon. Much of the research focus to date has been on…
Complex dynamical systems driven by the unravelling of information can be modelled effectively by treating the underlying flow of information as the model input. Complicated dynamical behaviour of the system is then derived as an output.…
The spread of misinformation is a pressing global problem that has elicited a range of responses from researchers, policymakers, civil society and industry. Over the past decade, these stakeholders have developed many interventions to…
An agent may strategically employ a vague message to mislead an audience's belief about the state of the world, but this may cause the agent to feel guilt or negatively impact how the audience perceives the agent. Using a novel experimental…
A sender communicates private information about a hidden state to a receiver who seeks to match his action to that state. The sender strives to appear informed at the receiver's expense. I characterize informative equilibria under a broad…
With the spread of false and misleading information in current news, many algorithmic tools have been introduced with the aim of assessing bias and reliability in written content. However, there has been little work exploring how effective…
News outlets, surveyors, and other organizations often conduct polls on social networks to gain insights into public opinion. Such a poll is typically started by someone on a social network who sends it to her friends. If a person…
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…
This paper explains why, despite a marked increase in available political information on cable television and the Internet, citizens' levels of political knowledge have, at best, remained stagnant (Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1996). Since the…
This paper presents a model of costly information acquisition where decision-makers can choose whether to elaborate information superficially or precisely. The former action is costless, while the latter entails a processing cost. Within…
In Communication Theory, intermedia agenda-setting refers to the influence that different news sources may have on each other, and how this subsequently affects the breadth of information that is presented to the public. Several studies…
Over the past couple of years, the topic of "fake news" and its influence over people's opinions has become a growing cause for concern. Although the spread of disinformation on the Internet is not a new phenomenon, the widespread use of…
We study public persuasion when a sender communicates with a large audience that can fact-check at heterogeneous costs. The sender commits to a public information policy before the state is realized, but any verifiable claim she makes after…