Content Filtering with Inattentive Information Consumers

27 May 2022  ·  Ian Ball, James Bono, Justin Grana, Nicole Immorlica, Brendan Lucier, Aleksandrs Slivkins ·

We develop a model of content filtering as a game between the filter and the content consumer, where the latter incurs information costs for examining the content. Motivating examples include censoring misinformation, spam/phish filtering, and recommender systems. When the attacker is exogenous, we show that improving the filter's quality is weakly Pareto improving, but has no impact on equilibrium payoffs until the filter becomes sufficiently accurate. Further, if the filter does not internalize the information costs, its lack of commitment power may render it useless and lead to inefficient outcomes. When the attacker is also strategic, improvements to filter quality may sometimes decrease equilibrium payoffs.

PDF Abstract

Datasets


  Add Datasets introduced or used in this paper

Results from the Paper


  Submit results from this paper to get state-of-the-art GitHub badges and help the community compare results to other papers.

Methods


No methods listed for this paper. Add relevant methods here