Social networks, confirmation bias and shock elections

Edoardo Gallo and Alastair Langtry

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: This paper links the increasing prominence of social networks in politics to recent shock election outcomes. In our setup, agents learning on a network suffer from confirmation bias -- the tendency to ignore contrary evidence to ones own belief. Our main result is that confirmation bias slows down learning in a wide class of networks. For any network, consensus fails to emerge when confirmation bias is above a threshold. We explore the implications for elections and media markets. Confirmation bias increases the likelihood of shock elections, and encourages media organizations already at the fringe to take on even more extreme views.

Date: 2020-11, Revised 2026-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-net, nep-soc and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2011.00520

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