Realtime user ratings as a strategy for combatting misinformation : an experimental study

Published online: 28 January 2023Fact-checking takes time. As a consequence, verdicts are usually reached after a message has started to go viral and interventions can have only limited effect. A new approach inspired by the scholarly debate and implemented in practice is to harness the wisdom of the crowd by enabling recipients of an online message to attach veracity assessments to it, with the intention to allow poor initial crowd reception to temper belief in and further spread of misinformation. We study this approach by letting 4,000 subjects in 80 experimental bipartisan communities sequentially rate the veracity of informational messages. We nd that in well-mixed communities, the public display of earlier veracity ratings indeed enhances the correct classi cation of true and false messages by subsequent users. However, crowd intelligence back res when false information is sequentially rated in ideologically segregated communities. This happens because early raters’ ideological bias, which is aligned with a message, in uences later raters’ assessments away from the truth. These results suggest that network segregation poses an important problem for community misinformation detection systems that must be accounted for in the design of such systems

Reproducibility in Management Science

With the help of more than 700 reviewers we assess the reproducibility of nearly 500 articles published in the journal Management Science before and after the introduction of a new Data and Code Disclosure policy in 2019. When considering only articles for which data accessibility and hard- and software requirements were not an obstacle for reviewers, the results of more than 95%of articles under the new disclosure policy could be fully or largely computationally reproduced.However, for 29% of articles at least part of the dataset was not accessible to the reviewer. Considering all articles in our sample reduces the share of reproduced articles to 68%. These figures represent a significant increase compared to the period before the introduction of the disclosure policy, where only 12% of articles voluntarily provided replication materials, out of which 55% couldbe (largely) reproduced. Substantial heterogeneity in reproducibility rates across different fields is mainly driven by differences in dataset accessibility. Other reasons for unsuccessful reproduction attempts include missing code, unresolvable code errors, weak or missing documentation, but also soft- and hardware requirements and code complexity. Our findings highlight the importance of journal code and data disclosure policies, and suggest potential avenues for enhancing their effectiveness.<br/

Do self-talk phrases affect behavior in ultimatum games?

The current study investigates whether self-talk phrases can influence behavior in Ultimatum Games. In our three self-talk treatments, participants were instructed to tell themselves (i) to keep their own interests in mind, (ii) to also think of the other person, or (iii) to take some time to contemplate their decision. We investigate how such so-called experimenter-determined strategic self-talk phrases affect behavior and emotions in comparison to a control treatment without instructed self-talk. The results demonstrate that other-focused self-talk can nudge proposers towards fair behavior, as offers were higher in this group than in the other conditions. For responders, self-talk tended to increase acceptance rates of unfair offers as compared to the condition without self-talk. This effect is significant for both other-focused and contemplation-inducing self-talk but not for self-focused self-talk. In the self-focused condition, responders were most dissatisfied with unfair offers. These findings suggest that use of self-talk can increase acceptance rates in responders, and that focusing on personal interests can undermine this effect as it negatively impacts the responders’ emotional experience. In sum, our study shows that strategic self-talk interventions can be used to affect behavior in bargaining situations.

Boosting trust by facilitating communication: A model of trustee investments in information sharing

Trust problems hamper many social and economic exchanges. In such situations, there are often institutions that enable trustors to share information on the performance of trustees. While the benefits of such institutions have been researched extensively, little is known about their emergence. This article presents a game-theoretic model for the understanding of investments by trustees in establishing information sharing between trustors. The model allows for a simultaneous analysis of investments in and effects of institutions for information sharing. It captures two mechanisms by which a trustee’s investment can promote trust. First, a trustee’s investment in establishing information sharing can enable network effects that facilitate trust and trustworthiness. Second, it can promote trust by serving as a signal of intrinsic trustworthiness. The analysis of the model implies predictions for how characteristics of the interaction situation affect whether these mechanisms motivate a trustee to establish information sharing

Bridging the Digital Divide Narrows the Participation Gap:Evidence from a Quasi-Natural Experiment

Socio-economic inequality in access to the internet has decreased in affluent societies. We investigate how gaining access to the internet affected the civic and political participation of relatively disadvantaged late adopters by studying a quasi-natural experiment related to the American National Election Studies. In 2012, when about 80% of the U.S. population was already connected to the internet, the ANES face-to-face study was for the first time supplemented with a sample of online respondents. Our design exploits the fact that the firm (KnowledgePanel) that conducted the web survey and provided the prerecruited respondents had equipped offline sample households with free laptop computers and internet access. The findings show that gaining internet access promotes late adopters’ civic participation and turnout, whereas there is no evidence for effects on the likelihood of political activism. These findings indicate that the closing of the digital divide alleviated participatory inequality.</p

Embedding Trust : A Game-Theoretic Model for Investments in and Returns on Network Embeddedness

Social relations through which information disseminates promote efficiency in social and economic interactions that are characterized by problems of trust. This provides incentives for rational actors to invest in their relations. In this article, we study a game-theoretic model in which two trustors interact repeatedly with the same trustee and decide, at the beginning of the game, whether to invest in establishing an information exchange relation between one another. We show that the costs the trustors are willing to bear for establishing the relation vary in a non-monotonic way with the severity of the trust problem. The willingness to invest in the information exchange relation is high particularly for trust problems that are neither too small nor too severe

Social influence undermines the wisdom of the crowd in sequential decision making

Teams, juries, electorates, and committees must often select from various alternative courses of action what they judge to be the best option. The phenomenon that the central tendency of many independent estimates is often quite accurate—“the wisdom of the crowd”—suggests that group decisions based on plurality voting can be surprisingly wise. Recent experimental studies demonstrate that the wisdom of the crowd is further enhanced if individuals have the opportunity to revise their votes in response to the independent votes of others. We argue that this positive effect of social information turns negative if group members do not first contribute an independent vote but instead cast their votes sequentially such that early mistakes can cascade across strings of decision makers. Results from a laboratory experiment confirm that when subjects sequentially state which of two answers they deem correct, majorities are more often wrong when subjects can see how often the two answers have been chosen by previous subjects than when they cannot. As predicted by our theoretical model, this happens even though subjects’ use of social information improves the accuracy of their individual votes. A second experiment conducted over the internet involving larger groups indicates that although early mistakes on easy tasks are eventually corrected in long enough choice sequences, for difficult tasks wrong majorities perpetuate themselves, showing no tendency to self-correct.First published online: 8 October 202