OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Agents attempting to acquire information often lack exogenous information technologies of their own and thus rely on experts conveying cheap talk messages. To address this gap, I examine a model of costly search in which an uninformed receiver sequentially consults randomly drawn cheap-talking experts. Crucially, the pool of experts is heterogeneous, and the receiver cannot observe the sender’s motives. The dynamic nature of search creates a potential time inconsistency problem for the receiver, so the receiver searches weakly too much. In particular, low search costs make the receiver strictly worse off whenever i) senders’ preferences are sufficiently opposed and ii) there is a high enough incidence of ‘informative’ senders. Applying this model to social media regulation generates a key insight: maximally informative social media algorithms discriminate across users.