Search Results
Report
Misinformation in Social Media: The Role of Verification Incentives
We develop a model of a platform featuring producers of fake news as well as users who can share content and verify it at a cost. Since users supply news to other users, their actions affect fake news prevalence and strategic complementarities can arise: high levels of verification can lead to low prevalence of fake content, in turn inducing more unverified sharing that sustains high levels of verification. Equilibria in this market then arise as intersection points between a standard supply curve and a novel correspondence that generalizes a demand function to account for the users’ ...
Discussion Paper
Breaking Down the Market for Misinformation
The spread of misinformation online has been recognized as a growing social problem. In responding to the issue, social media platforms have (i) promoted the services of third-party fact-checkers; (ii) removed producers of misinformation and downgraded false content; and (iii) provided contextual information for flagged content, empowering users to determine the veracity of information for themselves. In a recent staff report, we develop a flexible model of misinformation to assess the efficacy of these types of interventions. Our analysis focuses on how well these measures incentivize users ...
Discussion Paper
Leader-Follower Dynamics in Shareholder Activism
Activist shareholders play a central role in modern corporations, influencing the capital structure, business strategy, and governance of firms. Such “blockholders” range from investors who actively jawbone or break up firms to index funds that are largely passive in that they limit themselves to voting. In between, however, is a key group of blockholders that have historically focused on trading but have embraced activism as an established business strategy in the past few decades. Campaigns involving such “trading” blockholders have become ubiquitous, increasingly targeting ...
Discussion Paper
The Central Banking Beauty Contest
Expectations can play a significant role in driving economic outcomes, with central banks factoring market sentiment into policy decisions and market participants forming their own assumptions about monetary policy. But how well do central banks understand the expectations of market participants—and vice versa? Our model, developed in a recent paper, features a dynamic game between (i) a monetary authority that cannot commit to an inflation target and (ii) a set of market participants that understand the incentives created by that credibility problem. In this post, we describe the game, a ...
Report
Coexistence of Banks and Non-Banks: Intermediation Functions and Strategies
What is the essence of non-bank financial intermediation? How does it emerge and interact with intermediation performed by banks? To investigate these questions, we develop a model-based survey: we classify existing models into different intermediation functions á la Merton (1995) to show that variations of them admit a common modeling structure; then, we extend or reinterpret the resulting models to connect equilibrium strategies to non-bank activities in practice. Particular emphasis is placed on the coexistence of banks and non-banks: how their competition, or the extent of cooperation ...
Report
Leader-Follower Dynamics in Shareholder Activism
We propose a theory of coordination and influence among blockholders. Privately informed activists time their trades in sequence to lower acquisition costs, prompting a strategic use of order flows. Leader activists create trading gains for their followers, ultimately influencing their willingness to bear greater value-enhancing intervention costs. Through this channel, informed trades can exhibit predictability, in sharp contrast with Kyle (1985). We explain how this novel predictability shapes free-rider problems affecting governance, and how it produces price abnormalities analogous to ...
Discussion Paper
Who Is Borrowing and Lending in the Eurodollar and Selected Deposit Markets?
A recent Liberty Street Economics post discussed who is borrowing and lending in the federal funds (fed funds) market. This post explores activity in two other markets for short-term bank liabilities that are often perceived as close substitutes for fed funds—the markets for Eurodollars and “selected deposits.”
Report
Signaling with Private Monitoring
A sender signals her private information to a receiver who privately monitors the sender’s behavior, while the receiver transmits his private inferences back through an imperfect public signal of his actions. In a linear-quadratic-Gaussian setup in continuous time, we construct linear Markov equilibria, where the state variables are the players’ beliefs up to the sender’s second order belief. This state is an explicit function of the sender’s past play—hence, her private information—which leads to separation through the second-order belief channel. We examine the implications of ...
Discussion Paper
Consumer Scores and Price Discrimination
The consumer suffers because she buys less (with the loss represented by the red area). And while not depicted, she also suffers from future price discrimination due to information about her willingness to pay (that is, the intercept of her demand function) getting transmitted to Firm 2. However, Firm 1 is forced to lower its price (P’ in the figure) after the strategic demand reduction occurs. If the consumer has high willingness to pay, the benefit of this discount applied to many units is such that she wants to be tracked (the blue area—a benefit—grows as the intercept of demand ...
Discussion Paper
Who’s Borrowing and Lending in the Fed Funds Market Today?
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) communicates the stance of monetary policy through a target range for the federal funds rate, which is the rate set in the market for uncollateralized short-term lending and borrowing of central bank reserves in the U.S. Since the global financial crisis, the market for federal funds has changed markedly. In this post, we take a closer look at who is currently trading in the federal funds market, as well as the reasons for their participation.