We build a search-and-matching algorithm of network dynamics with decision-making under incomplete information, seeking to understand the determinants of the observed gradual downgrading of expert opinion on complicated issues and the decreasing trust in science. Even without fake news,...

We develop a model of information exchange through communication and investigate its implications for information aggregation in large societies. An \textit{underlying state} determines payoffs from different actions. Agents decide which others to form a costly \textit{communication link} with,...

If Anne knows more than Bob about the state of the world, she may or may not know what Bob thinks, but it is always possible that she does. In other words, if the distribution of Anne's belief about the state is a mean-preserving spread of the distribution of Bob's belief, we can construct...

Social media have become an increasingly important source of information about political, social and economic issues. While beneficial on many levels, the decentralized nature of these media may expose societies to novel risks of manipulation by third parties. To evaluate these risks, we study a...

We build a model of network dynamics with decision-making under incomplete information in order to understand the determinants of the observed gradual downgrading of expert opinion on complicated issues and the decreasing trust in science. We suggest a search and matching mechanism behind...

Why do people appear to forgo information by sorting into “echo chambers”? We construct a highly tractable multi-sender, multi-receiver cheap talk game in which players choose with whom to communicate. We show that segregation into small, homogeneous groups can improve everybody’s...

A firm’s choices can shape patterns of consumer communication about its product. This paper examines the problem for a firm that can both set price and target sales when selling a product of hidden, exogenous quality over two sales rounds to consumers who share information locally with their...

An economic argument in favor of direct democracy in a social choice setting with pure common values, private noisy information about an unobservable payoff-relevant state of the world, and costless voting is essentially one about information aggregation: if all citizens vote according to their...

A central assumption of the canonical cheap talk literature is that people misreport their private information if this is to their material benefit. Recent evidence from laboratory experiments with student subjects suggests, however, that while many people do report the payoff-maximizing...

We consider an agent who decides whether to employ an information structure to learn about a payoff-relevant state of the world before making a decision. Information is costly either because (1) the agent has to wait for the availability of the information structure and is impatient or because...