The rise of social media has encouraged guru dreams because of the low entry barrier and highly skewed distribution of public attention that characterize social media. The pursuit of guru status, however, may be achieved through information provision or cheap talk, and competition inherent to...

In this paper we build a formal model to study market environments where information is costly to acquire and is of use also to potential competitors. In such situations a market for information may form, where reports - of unverifiable quality - over the information acquired are sold. A...