Creating confusion

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Edmond, Chris; Lu, Yang K.
• 署名单位: University of Melbourne; Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC THEORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0531
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2020.105145
• 发表日期: 2021
• 关键词: Persuasion; BIAS; noise; Social media; fake news; Alternative Facts

摘要

We develop a model in which a politician seeks to prevent a group of citizens from making informed decisions. The politician can manipulate information at a cost. The citizens are rational and internalize the politician's incentives. In the unique equilibrium of the game, the citizens' beliefs are unbiased but endogenously noisy. We interpret the social media revolution as a shock that simultaneously (i) improves the underlying, intrinsic precision of the citizens' information, but also (ii) reduces the politician's costs of manipulation. We show that there is a critical threshold such that if the costs of manipulation fall enough, the social media revolution makes the citizens worse off despite the underlying improvement in their information. (C) 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.