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In recent decades, dictatorships based on mass repression have largely given way to a new model based on the manipulation of information. Instead of terrorizing citizens into submission, \"informational autocrats\" artificially boost their popularity by convincing the public they are competent. To do so, they use propaganda and silence informed members of the elite by co-optation or censorship. Using several sources, including a newly created dataset on authoritarian control techniques, we document a range of trends in recent autocracies consistent with this new model: a decline in violence, efforts to conceal state repression, rejection of official ideologies, imitation of democracy, a perceptions gap between the masses and the elite, and the adoption by leaders of a rhetoric of performance rather than one aimed at inspiring fear.

We commonly think of information as a means to an end. However, a growing theoretical and experimental literature suggests that information may directly enter the agent's utility function. This can create an incentive to avoid information, even when it is useful, free, and independent of strategic considerations. We review research documenting the occurrence of information avoidance, as well as theoretical and empirical research on reasons why people avoid information, drawing from economics, psychology, and other disciplines. The review concludes with a discussion of some of the diverse (and often costly) individual and societal consequences of information avoidance.

Despite recent industry attention, questions remain about how native advertising is perceived and processed by consumers. Two experiments examined effects of language and positioning in native advertising disclosures on recognition of the content as advertising, effects of recognition on brand and publisher evaluations, and whether disclosure position affects visual attention. Findings show that middle or bottom positioning and wording using \"advertising\" or \"sponsored\" increased advertising recognition compared to other conditions, and ad recognition generally led to more negative evaluations. Visual attention mediated the relationship between disclosure position and advertising recognition. Theoretical, practical, and regulatory implications for disclosures in native advertising are discussed.

Fake news (i.e., misinformation) on social media has sharply increased in the past few years. We conducted a behavioral experiment with EEG data from 83 social media users to understand whether they could detect fake news on social media, and whether the presence of a fake news flag affected their cognition and judgment. We found that the presence of a fake news flag triggered increased cognitive activity and users spent more time considering the headline. However, the flag had no effect on judgments about truth; flagging headlines as false did not influence users’ beliefs. A post hoc analysis shows that confirmation bias is pervasive, with users more likely to believe news headlines that align with their political opinions. Headlines that challenge their opinions receive little cognitive attention (i.e., they are ignored) and users are less likely to believe them.

We build an empirical model to attribute delays in mortgage refinancing to psychological costs inhibiting refinancing until incentives are sufficiently strong; and behavior, potentially attributable to information-gathering costs, lowering the probability of household refinancing per unit time at any incentive. We estimate the model on administrative panel data from Denmark, where mortgage refinancing without cash-out is unconstrained. Middle-aged and wealthy households act as if they have high psychological refinancing costs; but older, poorer, and less-educated households refinance with lower probability irrespective of incentives, thereby achieving lower savings. We use the model to understand frictions in the mortgage channel of monetary policy transmission.

In the light of the information age, information overload research in new areas (e.g., social media, virtual collaboration) rises rapidly in many fields of research in business administration with a variety of methods and subjects. This review article analyzes the development of information overload literature in business administration and related interdisciplinary fields and provides a comprehensive and overarching overview using a bibliometric literature analysis combined with a snowball sampling approach. For the last decade, this article reveals research directions and bridges of literature in a wide range of fields of business administration (e.g., accounting, finance, health management, human resources, innovation management, international management, information systems, marketing, manufacturing, or organizational science). This review article identifies the major papers of various research streams to capture the pulse of the information overload-related research and suggest new questions that could be addressed in the future and identifies concrete open gaps for further research. Furthermore, this article presents a new framework for structuring information overload issues which extends our understanding of influence factors and effects of information overload in the decision-making process.

A data buyer faces a decision problem under uncertainty. He can augment his initial private information with supplemental data from a data seller. His willingness to pay for supplemental data is determined by the quality of his initial private information. The data seller optimally offers a menu of statistical experiments. We establish the properties that any revenue-maximizing menu of experiments must satisfy. Every experiment is a non-dispersed stochastic matrix, and every menu contains a fully informative experiment. In the cases of binary states and actions, or binary types, we provide an explicit construction of the optimal menu of experiments.

Consumers’ postpurchase evaluations have received much attention due to the strong link between ratings and sales. However, less is known about how herding effects from reference groups (i.e., crowd and friends) unfold in online ratings. This research examines the role of divergent opinions, rater experience, and firm product portfolio in attenuating/amplifying herding influences in online rating environments. Applying robust econometric techniques on data from a community of board gamers, we find that herding effects are significant and recommend a more nuanced view of herding. Highlighting the role of rater experience, the positive influence of the crowd is weakened and friend influences are amplified as the rater gains experience. Furthermore, divergent opinions between reference groups create herding and differentiation depending on the reference group and the rater’s experience level. Finally, firms can influence online opinion through their product portfolio in profound ways. A broad and deep product portfolio not only leads to favorable quality inferences but also attenuates social influence. Implications for online reputation management, rating system design, and firm product strategy are discussed.

How do IT-enabled capabilities influence firms’ ability to leverage customer involvement and shape the amount of firm innovation? This study theorizes that effective processing and management of customer information flows requires organizations to possess “relational information processing capability” (RIPC) and “analytical information processing capability” (AIPC). Drawing on and extending the theories of absorptive capacity and complementarities in the context of innovation, we posit that RIPC and AIPC complement product-focused customer involvement (PCI) and information-intensive customer involvement (ICI) practices, respectively, to enhance the amount of firm innovation. To test our hypotheses, we collected archival data from more than 300 large U.S. manufacturing firms and mapped their RIPC and AIPC to specific IT applications. Consistent with our theorizing, we find that RIPC positively moderates the relationship between PCI and amount of firm innovation and that AIPC positively moderates the relationship between ICI and amount of firm innovation. In further exploratory analysis, we find a positive three-way interaction between AIPC, RIPC, and PCI. Taken together, the results suggest that configurations of IT-enabled capabilities alone are not enough for innovation; instead, firms benefit more when specific configurations of IT-enabled capabilities are leveraged in unison with specific types of customer involvement. The study contributes to theory and practice by shedding light on important complementarities between specific types of customer involvement (PCI and ICI) and specific IT-enabled capabilities (RIPC and AIPC).

Individuals must often choose among discrete actions with imperfect information about their payoffs. Before choosing, they have an opportunity to study the payoffs, but doing so is costly. This creates new choices such as the number of and types of questions to ask. We model these situations using the rational inattention approach to information frictions. We find that the decision maker's optimal strategy results in choosing probabilistically in line with a generalized multinomial logit model, which depends both on the actions' true payoffs as well as on prior beliefs.