Searching for Expertise
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.
Date:
6 June 2025, 12:45
Venue:
Manor Road Building, Manor Road OX1 3UQ
Venue Details:
Seminar Room G
Speaker:
Guru Ganeson (University of Oxford)
Organising department:
Department of Economics
Part of:
Student Research Workshop in Micro Theory
Booking required?:
Not required
Audience:
Members of the University only
Editor:
Edward Clark
