Peer-to-Peer Information Sharing with Social Image Concerns

Abstract

(Joint work with Philipp Denter)

We study how social image concerns drive information sharing patterns between peers. A sender receives a piece of information (”news”) and can either share it with a peer (“receiver”) or not. Information has two dimensions, veracity and relevance. Veracity is only observable upon inspection to talented receivers (at a cost) while everyone observes relevance. While individuals share news to be perceived as talented (able to recognize proper information), sharing may lead to a higher proportion of improper news. We derive conditions under which these improper news spread more than proper news and study other consequences of different social image concerns for sharing patterns. For example, we highlight how a motive of signaling one's worldview through information sharing leads to echo chambers where peers receive disproportionally many news that align with their prior. Different sharing motives thus create empirically distinguishable sharing patterns.