Leader-Follower Dynamics in Shareholder Activism



verifying and sharing500

Misinformation in Social Media: The Role of Verification Incentives

We introduce a model of a platform in which users encounter news of unknown veracity. Users vary in their propensity to share news and can learn the veracity of news at a cost. In turn, the production of fake news is both more sensitive to sharing rates and cheaper than its truthful counterpart. As in traditional markets, the prevalence of fake news is determined by a demand and a supply of misinformation. Unlike traditional markets, the exercise of market power is generally limited unless segmentation methods are employed. Combating fake news by lowering verification costs can be ineffective due to the demand for misinformation only weakly reducing, while the use of algorithms that imperfectly filter news for users can lead to more prevalence and diffusion of misinformation. Our findings highlight the important role that natural elasticity measures have for policy evaluation. 

A Note on the Comparative Statics of Optimal Procurement Auctions

We find a sufficient condition such that a distributional upgrade on a seller’s cost distribution implies a lower expected procurement cost for a buyer. We also show that even under the strongest assumption about this upgrade made in the literature so far, the seller can be worse off, even if this upgrade is costless.