Location
260-055, Owen G. Glenn Building
Start Date
12-15-2014
Description
Online platforms are prone to abuse and manipulation from strategic parties. For example, social media and review websites suffer from the presence of opinion spam and fake reviews. Applying the economic concept of rational expectation equilibrium (REE), we explore the impact of manipulation on consumer welfare in a Twitter-like environment. We argue that the REE outcome can be decomposed into a firm-centric effect and a rational expectation effect, and the relative strength of these effects determines the final level of manipulation. We also examine the effect of competition on firms’ manipulation levels. We find that the combination of a competition effect and a rational expectation effect determines the overall effect of competition on strategic manipulation. This research sheds light on the reliability of opinion mining, and contributes to our understanding of strategic manipulation in the context of sentiment analysis.
Recommended Citation
Lee, Shun-Yang; Qiu, Liangfei; and Whinston, Andrew, "Manipulation: Online Platforms’ Inescapable Fate" (2014). ICIS 2014 Proceedings. 2.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2014/proceedings/EconomicsandValue/2
Manipulation: Online Platforms’ Inescapable Fate
260-055, Owen G. Glenn Building
Online platforms are prone to abuse and manipulation from strategic parties. For example, social media and review websites suffer from the presence of opinion spam and fake reviews. Applying the economic concept of rational expectation equilibrium (REE), we explore the impact of manipulation on consumer welfare in a Twitter-like environment. We argue that the REE outcome can be decomposed into a firm-centric effect and a rational expectation effect, and the relative strength of these effects determines the final level of manipulation. We also examine the effect of competition on firms’ manipulation levels. We find that the combination of a competition effect and a rational expectation effect determines the overall effect of competition on strategic manipulation. This research sheds light on the reliability of opinion mining, and contributes to our understanding of strategic manipulation in the context of sentiment analysis.