This paper investigates and quantifies citizens' susceptibility to fake news and assesses, using a randomized control trial, the effectiveness of a policy intervention to raise awareness. We find that the average citizen lacks proficiency in identifying fake news and harbors an inflated...

Fake news has an extremely high impact on society, spreading quite simple and fast through social media, TV, internet, press, and other means of communication. The false news about the new coronavirus is blocked by the authorities, according to the decree for establishing a state of emergency....

In this paper we examine what "data literacy" - under various definitions - means at a time of persistent distribution of "dis-/mis-/mal-information" via digital media. The paper first explores the definition of literacies (written, media, information, digital and data literacies) considering...

This paper proposes an original behavioural finance representative agent model, to explain how fake news' empirical price impacts can persist in finance despite contradicting the efficient-market hypothesis. The model reconciles empirically-observed price overreactions to fake news with...

Widespread misconceptions can be critical, especially in times of crisis. Through a field experiment, we study how to address such wrong or inaccurate beliefs using messages delivered to individual citizens using mobile phones. We focus on misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic in a...

This paper analyzes the implications of those types of interventions that affect misreporting costs. I study a model of communication between an uninformed voter and a media outlet that knows the quality of two competing candidates. The alternatives available to the voter are endogenously...

We study the impact of bots on social learning in a social network setting. Regular agents receive independent noisy signals about the true value of a variable and then communicate in a network. They na¨?vely update beliefs by repeatedly taking weighted averages of neighbors' opinions. Bots are...

The proliferation of fake news poses significant challenges for policymakers and raises concerns about its potential impact on economic stability. This paper explores this question, focusing on the macroeconomic effects of technology related fake news in the US for the period 2007-2022....