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

Autor(en)

Jean-Robert Tyran, Melis Kartal

Abstrakt

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(en)

Wiener Zentrum für Experimentelle Wirtschaftsforschung, Institut für Volkswirtschaftslehre

Externe Organisation(en)

Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien (WU)

Journal

American Economic Review

Band

112

Seiten

3367-3397

Anzahl der Seiten

31

ISSN

0002-8282

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20201844

Publikationsdatum

10-2022

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

502045 Verhaltensökonomie, 502057 Experimentelle Ökonomie

Schlagwörter

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Economics and Econometrics

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/4e38ff4a-f203-4406-ace0-6b8218692e76