2024/10/25 by Dana Sisak, Sisak, Dana, Philipp Denter +1 · 1 citation
Business, Management and Accounting · Computer Science · Social Sciences · #FOS: Economics and business #FinTech, Crowdfunding, Digital Finance #Misinformation and Its Impacts #Spam and Phishing Detection #Theoretical Economics (econ.TH)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2410.19557
openalex publication_date 2024/10/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
We study how social image concerns shape information sharing among peers. Individuals receive a signal about a binary state of the world characterized by both a direction and a veracity status. While the direction is freely observable, verifying veracity is costly and depends on individual type. We consider two distinct social image motives: a desire to appear competent and a desire to signal one's worldview. For each motive, we characterize equilibrium sharing behavior and derive implications for the quality of shared information. We identify conditions under which false news is shared more frequently than factual news (e.g., Vosoughi et al., 2018). Both competence- and worldview-based motives can rationalize such patterns, though they yield empirically distinct sharing behaviors and different welfare implications. Finally, we derive testable predictions for each motive and discuss how these align with existing empirical evidence.