Fake News, Voter Overconfidence, and the Quality of Democratic Choice

Author(s)
Jean-Robert Tyran, Melis Kartal
Abstract

This paper studies, theoretically and experimentally, the effects of overconfidence and fake news on information aggregation and the quality of democratic choice in a common-interest setting. We theoretically show that overconfidence exacerbates the adverse effects of widespread misinformation (i.e., fake news). We then analyze richer models that allow for partisanship, targeted misinformation intended to sway public opinion, and news signals correlated across voters (due to media ownership concentration or censorship). In our experiment, overconfidence severely undermines information aggregation, suggesting that the effect of overconfidence can be much more pronounced at the collective than at the individual level.

Organisation(s)
Vienna Center for Experimental Economics, Department of Economics
External organisation(s)
Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien (WU)
Journal
American Economic Review
Volume
112
Pages
3367-3397
No. of pages
31
ISSN
0002-8282
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20201844
Publication date
10-2022
Peer reviewed
Yes
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
502045 Behavioural economics, 502057 Experimental economics
Keywords
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Economics and Econometrics
Portal url
https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/fake-news-voter-overconfidence-and-the-quality-of-democratic-choice(4e38ff4a-f203-4406-ace0-6b8218692e76).html