The Information Economy

Ashutosh Bhagwat argues in new research that expecting social media platforms to serve as gatekeepers for the “truth” flounders on economic, organizational, and democratic grounds. In fact, the end of media gatekeepers and elite control over public discourse may be what is necessary to reinvigorate the marketplace of ideas and reduce political polarization.

Access to the internet and the rise of social media has overloaded voters with information and exposed them to a proliferation of fake news. Using political budget cycles, or the tendency for politicians to increase the budget in run-up to elections to win more votes, as a proxy for misinformation, Fabio Padovano and Pauline Mille show in new research that voters who score higher on the OECD’s  Programme for International Student Assessment and achieve a higher level of education are better able to hold politicians to account.

In new research, Arseniy Samsonov builds a model showing how having available to the public a multitude of media outlets and social media platforms would not help reduce misinformation from politicians. Rather, monopolistic power could enable these outlets to retain control over the narratives around the information that these politicians provide to journalists and platforms in exchange for publicity and coverage, thus reducing misinformation.

Why ban competitive offers in the online world when they’re allowed offline? Big tech wants plain vanilla broadband pricing because it forecloses platform competition.

A decade of evidence suggests that Open Internet policies have delivered the opposite effect.

Will increasing the liability of internet platforms mitigate disinformation? Economists weighed in on the effects of limiting or repealing protections for Big Tech through a recent survey from the Forum for the Kent A. Clark Center for Global Markets—previously the Initiative on Global Markets—at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

In The Spectacle of Expertise: Why Financial Analysts Perform in the Media, Alex Preda explores how financial analysts produce their advice and convince audiences...

In the March 30 episode of Capitalisn’t, Bethany McLean and Luigi Zingales discuss the Twitter Files, why so much of the mainstream media has...

In response to rising concerns about political disinformation, governments have introduced a slew of interventions. Federico Vaccari warns in new research that these interventions...

Collective shaming on social media is crucial in reducing corporate misbehavior — and society would be significantly worse off without watchdog platforms. Social media, once...