scholarly journals Game theoretic analysis of ideologically biased clickbait or fake news and real news

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kjell Hausken

A decision and game theoretic model is developed for how one and two news organisations strike balances between producing clickbait or fake news, and real news. Each news organisation seeks to attract gullible consumers who consume more clickbait or fake news than real news, and non-gullible consumers who conscientiously consume only real news. Increasing a news organisation budget results in obtaining both more clickbait or fake news, and more real news. More clickbait or fake news is produced if the news organisation’s unit cost of effort to produce real news, the production efficiency for clickbait or fake news, and the fraction of consumers consuming clickbait or fake news, increase. In contrast, less clickbait or fake news is produced if a news organisation’s unit cost of effort to produce clickbait or fake news, and the production efficiency for real news, increase, and the gullible consumers consume real news with a higher frequency. Lower unit effort costs and higher budget and production efficiencies cause higher utility for a news organisation and lower utility for the competing news organisation. Higher weight assigned to the contest over clickbait or fake news induces both news organ-isations to exert higher effort to produce clickbait or fake news. When the gullible consumers of a news organisation consume a relatively large amount of real news in comparison to the consumers of another news organisation, then the first news organisation exerts higher effort to produce real news and obtains higher utility than the other news organisation.

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 485-508 ◽  
Author(s):  
HUN CHUNG

ABSTRACT:Hobbes's own justification for the existence of governments relies on the assumption that without a government our lives in the state of nature would result in a state of war of every man against every man. Many contemporary scholars have tried to explain why universal war is unavoidable in Hobbes's state of nature by utilizing modern game theory. However, most game-theoretic models that have been presented so far do not accurately capture what Hobbes deems to be the primary cause of conflict in the state of nature—namely, uncertainty, rather than people's egoistic psychology. Therefore, I claim that any game-theoretic model that does not incorporate uncertainty into the picture is the wrong model. In this paper, I use Bayesian game theory to show how universal conflict can break out in the state of nature—even when the majority of the population would strictly prefer to cooperate and seek peace with other people—due to uncertainty about what type of person the other player is. Along the way, I show that the valuation of one's own life is one of the central mechanisms that drives Hobbes's pessimistic conclusion.


Games ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 48
Author(s):  
Kjell Hausken

A model is developed for two players exerting media manipulation efforts to support each of two actors who interact controversially. Early evidence may support one actor, while the full evidence emerging later may support the other actor. Exerting effort when the full evidence exceeds (falls short off) the early evidence is rewarded (punished) with lower (higher) unit effort cost. Properties and simulations are presented to illustrate the players’ strategic challenges when altering eight model parameters, i.e., a player’s unit effort cost, stake in the interaction, proportionality parameter scaling the strength of reward or punishment, time discount parameter, early evidence, full evidence, contest intensity, and evidence ratio intensity. Realizing the logic of the model may aid understanding on how to handle the difference between early and full evidence of controversies, in which players have an ideological stake.


2020 ◽  
Vol 66 (6) ◽  
pp. 2432-2451 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ron Adner ◽  
Jianqing Chen ◽  
Feng Zhu

We study compatibility decisions of two competing platform owners that generate profits through both hardware sales and royalties from content sales. We consider a game-theoretic model in which two platforms offer different standalone utilities to users. We find that incentives to establish one-way compatibility—the platform owner with smaller standalone value grants access to its proprietary content application to users of the competing platform—can arise from the difference in their profit foci. As the difference in the standalone utilities increases, royalties from content sales become less important to the platform owner with greater standalone value, but more important to the other platform owner. One-way compatibility can thus increase asymmetry between the platform owners’ profit foci and, given a sufficiently large difference in the standalone utilities, yields greater profits for both platform owners. We further show that social welfare is greater under one-way compatibility than under incompatibility. We also investigate how factors such as exclusive content and hardware-only adopters affect compatibility incentives. This paper was accepted by Chris Forman, information systems.


2004 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonja Vogt ◽  
Jeroen Weesie

AbstractThis paper derives hypotheses on how dyadic social support is affected by heterogeneity of the actors. We distinguish heterogeneity with respect to three parameters. First, the likelihood of needing support; second, the benefits from support relative to the costs for providing support; and, third, time preferences. The hypotheses are based on a game theoretic analysis of an iterated Support Game. We predict that, given homogeneity in two of these parameters, the prospect for mutual support is optimal if actors are homogeneous with respect to the third parameter as well. Second, under heterogeneity with respect to two of the parameters, support is most likely if there is a specific heterogeneous distribution with respect to the other parameter that ‘compensates’ for the original heterogeneity. Third, under weak conditions, the overall optimal condition for mutual support is full homogeneity of the actors.


2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 2035-2046 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rajani Singh ◽  
Ashutosh Dhar Dwivedi ◽  
Gautam Srivastava ◽  
Agnieszka Wiszniewska-Matyszkiel ◽  
Xiaochun Cheng

Abstract Blockchain and cryptocurrency are a hot topic in today’s digital world. In this paper, we create a game theoretic model in continuous time. We consider a dynamic game model of the bitcoin market, where miners or players use mining systems to mine bitcoin by investing electricity into the mining system. Although this work is motivated by BTC, the work presented can be applicable to other mining systems similar to BTC. We propose three concepts of dynamic game theoretic solutions to the model: Social optimum, Nash equilibrium and myopic Nash equilibrium. Using the model that a player represents a single “miner” or a “mining pool”, we develop novel and interesting results for the cryptocurrency world.


2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (02) ◽  
pp. 1640001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vladimir V. Mazalov ◽  
Anna A. Ivashko ◽  
Elena N. Konovalchikova

This paper studies a game-theoretic model of best choice with incomplete information. In this model, players observe a sequence of incoming objects each described by two random quality components. The first component is announced to players and the other one is hidden. Players choose an object based on known information about it. The winner is the player having a higher sum of the quality components than the opponents do. The optimal strategies of the players and their payoffs in the game are derived.


2017 ◽  
pp. 120-130
Author(s):  
A. Lyasko

Informal financial operations exist in the shadow of official regulation and cannot be protected by the formal legal instruments, therefore raising concerns about the enforcement of obligations taken by their participants. This paper analyzes two alternative types of auxiliary institutions, which can coordinate expectations of the members of informal value transfer systems, namely attitudes of trust and norms of social control. It offers some preliminary approaches to creating a game-theoretic model of partner interaction in the informal value transfer system. It also sheds light on the perspectives of further studies in this area of institutional economics.


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