No abstract

We study a signal‐jamming model of product review manipulation in which rational consumers consult product reviews and price to better estimate a product's quality, and a firm, whose quality is either high or low, chooses its price and how much bias to insert into product reviews. We show that both firm types always exert positive effort to manipulate product reviews, and, depending on the equilibrium price level, one or both of them can increase its sales. When the high‐type firm exerts more effort than the low‐type, review manipulation benefits consumers by raising [lowering] their demand for the high‐quality [low‐quality] product.

No abstract

We provide a game‐theoretical model of manipulative election campaigns with two political candidates and a Bayesian voter. The latter is uncertain about how good the candidates are. Candidates take unobservable, costly actions to manipulate voter's opinion about their positions. We show that if the candidates differ in campaigning efficiency, and the voter receives the biased campaign messages with some noise, then the cost‐efficient candidate can win the election with higher probability than her opponent even when she is ex‐post an inferior choice for the voter. Our paper offers a novel informational justification for imposing limits on campaign spending and encouraging diversity in the supply of political information.

An increase in the salience of ethnic/racial (E/R) disputes often signifies a shift in the E/R status quo of a society. We present a labor market model where matching frictions are higher for the E/R minority due to labor market discrimination and the unemployment insurance benefits are determined via competitive elections. We hypothesize that a reduction in labor market discrimination, possibly because of its salience, shifts the unemployment from the minority to the majority, leading to a drop in the unemployment rate among the black minority, and consequently the unemployment insurance they receive. Nevertheless, the total unemployment insurance benefit may increase because the median voter, who is a member of the majority, prefers a higher level of unemployment insurance. To empirically test our hypothesis, we constructed a novel, news‐based, and time‐varying measure of E/R discrimination salience for the US and show that unemployment insurance benefits to the black minority decreases in response to an increase in our measure.