It’s our great pleasure to welcome Professor Jens Prüfer (University of East Anglia) for a distinguished guest lecture on Thursday, January 19, 2023; 4.00 PM to 6.00 PM (Passau time/CET), in HK 16 room 202.
The afternoon will be especially valuable for all colleagues interested in issues around Institutional Economics, Organizational Economics, Industrial Organization and Economics of Innovation and Datafication.
Jens Prüfer is Professor of Economics at the University of East Anglia’s School of Economics, Deputy Director of the Centre for Competition Policy, and affiliated with the Tilburg Law and Economics Center (TILEC). His research focuses on institutional and organizational questions, applying economic methodology to a broad set of disciplines, including law, management, political science, history, religious studies, and computer science.
Recently, he has been studying topics such as “Consumers’ Privacy Choices in the Era of Big Data,” “Governance of Data Sharing: a Law & Economics Proposal,” “Competing with Big Data,” “Data Science for Entrepreneurship Research: Studying Demand Dynamics for Entrepreneurial Skills in the Netherlands” and “Faithful Strategies: How Religion Shapes Nonprofit Management”.
This winter, Jens is visiting our University for the first time as Mercator Fellow of our German Research Foundation (DFG) Research and Training Group “Digital Platform Ecosystems” (www.dpe.uni-passau.de).
In this spirit, he will give a talk about the role of social media in democracies. This topic will play an important role in the overall research program together with doctoral students at DPE and Jens as one of our external mentors. Here is an abstract of his talk:
Social media have become a main source of information for many voters. Political interest groups on social media platforms have the ability to (i) microtarget news based on individual-level voter data and (ii) obfuscate their identities, which can be exploited to spread disinformation. Two proposed interventions to prevent election manipulation by disinformation are a microtargeting ban and disclosure requirements. An empirical foundation for these interventions is missing. In a first set of treatments of our laboratory experiment, we study the effects of the implementation of a microtargeting ban and disclosure of interests in a social media environment on voting behavior. We find that disclosure of interests is essential to reduce the frequency of inefficient election outcomes. We also show that a microtargeting ban is redundant for `mainstream' voters but is needed to improve voter decision-making of a smaller, `niche' voter group. These findings are consistent with the result of our second set of treatments, in which we show that the transition from a traditional media environment to a social media environment makes all voters worse off. Lastly, we show that `niche’ voters are equally well off as `mainstream’ voters in games with public communication (one message for all voters) but stay behind in games with a microtargeted communication technology (one message for each voter group).