Perverse ethical concerns: Misinformation and coordination

Dongkyu Chang and Allen Vong

Journal of Economic Theory, 2025, vol. 226, issue C

Abstract: We study a coordination game played by a large number of agents, who acquire private signals about a hidden state on a platform before choosing individual actions. The platform privately and imperfectly filters misinformation, improving the precision of these signals. We show that a platform with an ethical concern to proactively improve agents' welfare could perversely reduce their welfare by aggravating their disagreements about the state and in turn undermining coordination. We also show that misinformation regulations aimed at improving agents' welfare are effective if and only if their implementation is sufficiently aggressive.

Keywords: Disagreements; Misinformation; Platform; Social media (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D83 L86 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022053125000572
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jetheo:v:226:y:2025:i:c:s0022053125000572

DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2025.106011

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Theory is currently edited by A. Lizzeri and K. Shell

More articles in Journal of Economic Theory from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().