We investigate the role of conflicting interests in a boundedly rational model of belief dynamics. Individuals have different preferences about the action to take, are subject to persuasion bias and repeatedly communicate with their neighbors in a social network. They communicate strategically...

Purpose- The study complements the scant macroeconomic literature on the development outcomes of social media by examining the relationship between Facebook penetration and violent crime levels in a cross-section of 148 countries for the year 2012. Design/methodology/approach- The empirical...

This study investigates the relationship between social media and inclusive human development in 49 African countries for the year 2012. Social media is measured with Facebook penetration whereas inclusive human development is proxied by the inequalityadjusted human development index. The...

The study assesses the relationship between terrorism and social media from a cross section of 148 countries with data for the year 2012. The empirical evidence is based on Ordinary Least Squares, Negative Binomial and Quantile regressions. The main finding is that there is a positive...

A distinctive feature of recent revolutions was the key role of social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube). We study the role of social media in mobilization. In a simple model we assume that while social media allow to observe all previous decisions, mass media only give aggregate...

This paper presents a review of empirical methods used to assess the behavioral, economic, and political outcomes of Internet and social media usage. Instead of merely surveying the various impacts of the Internet, we examine the methods adopted to identify these impacts. We describe two main...

This paper investigates the link between social media and hate crime. We show that anti-refugee sentiment on Facebook predicts crimes against refugees in otherwise similar municipalities with higher social media usage. To establish causality, we exploit exogenous variation in the timing of major...

This study investigates the relationship between social media and inclusive human development in 49 African countries for the year 2012. Social media is measured with Facebook penetration whereas inclusive human development is proxied by the inequality- adjusted human development index. The...