Electoral competition with fake news

Title Media as Watchdogs: the Role of News Media in Electoral Competition Media as Watchdogs: the Role of News Media in Electoral Competition *

We develop an equilibrium model to analyze the role of the media in electoral competition. When policy payoffs are state-dependent, party policies do not converge to the median voter’s ideal policy if the media report only party policies. News analysis about the state, though possibly biased, can discipline off-equilibrium deviations and make the parties adopt more centrist policies. Since vote...

Electoral Competition with Local Externalities

We study a simple model of public opinion formation that posits that interaction between neighbouring agents leads to bandwagons in the dynamics of individual opinion choices, as well as in that of the aggregate process. We then analyze the implication that these findings have in terms of space-time allocation of fundings in an electoral campaign, where two candidates run in a winner-take-all e...

Fake News in Social Networks

We model the spread of news as a social learning game on a network. Agents can either endorse or oppose a claim made in a piece of news, which itself may be either true or false. Agents base their decision on a private signal and their neighbors’ past actions. Given these inputs, agents follow strategies derived via multi-agent deep reinforcement learning and receive utility from acting in acco...

The Economics of "Fake News"

Automatic Detection of Fake News

The proliferation of misleading information in everyday access media outlets such as social media feeds, news blogs, and online newspapers have made it challenging to identify trustworthy news sources, thus increasing the need for computational tools able to provide insights into the reliability of online content. In this paper, we focus on the automatic identification of fake content in online...