Misinformation Due to Asymmetric Information Sharing

Do online social networks affect information asymmetry?

“…Moreover, Black (1998) emphasizes that the Internet can accentuate information asymmetry via the costs by undercutting the effectiveness of institutions in charge of monitoring information quality provided by issuers. Policymakers also play an important role, as Buechel et al (2023) emphasized. Without the knowledge of the true state of information, they have the propensity to mitigate information asymmetry by fostering informational shareability.…”

“…In other words, the users share true and/or false information differently, irrespective of whether they are 'consumers' or 'producers' of information. Buechel et al (2023) defined two kinds of information asymmetry related to the veracity of shared information: decay asymmetry and network asymmetry. The decay asymmetry means that "the false information tends to be shared further in a network than true information", while the network asymmetry supposes that "true and false information is shared more or less heavily in different parts of a given network" (Buechel et al, 2023, p. 2).…”

“…The theoretical ground of this study is given by Ackerlof's (1970) theory of information asymmetry but assumes a dynamic individual asymmetry derived from the contribution of Buechel et al (2023). In other words, as the people are differently impacted by the information shared via the OSNs, they will develop heterogeneous socio-economic, political, and cultural dynamic perceptions related to a given topic.…”

Learning from Viral Content

“…Instead of asking about the network structure that connects users on the platform (e.g., echo chambers) or fact-checking technologies, we consider the platform's choice in terms of showing its users more or less viral content. Buechel, Klößner, Meng, and Nassar (2022), like our work, also consider an environment where agents can share and re-share copies of a signal. They study a model in which agents' sharing behavior resembles the DeGroot heuristic.…”

“…Another difference is that we study a stochastic model where the diffusion of news stories is random even conditional on the realizations of all stories, due to the randomness in news-feed sampling. By contrast, Buechel et al (2022) analyze a mean-field approximation. The stochastic approximation techniques we use may be useful for understanding a stochastic version of their model.…”