Research

Online popularity can be manipulated quite easily as there are firms selling fake social media metrics (followers, views, likes, etc.). They create an opportunity for individuals who can monetize their online popularity. This paper investigates the short- and long-term economic consequences of online popularity manipulation for professional athletes who acquire fake followers. Focusing on soccer, we created a unique dataset of 1,077 international players and took advantage of Twitter’s suspicious account removal in July 2018 to proxy fake followers. Empirical explorations show strong ties between Twitter account creation, transfer involving financial negotiation and fake followers. Results show that fake followers significantly impact players’ value – i.e. transfer fees – but only if the transfer occurs within six months of the Twitter account creation. In this case, fake followers are associated with an average 5% rise (≈ €450,000) in transfer fees. While boosting online popularity can help a few individuals over the very short-term, the public exposure of possible manipulation creates distrust and harms the overall market. Our results show that a large share of lost followers (> 2%) has a significant and negative impact on transfer fees for transfers occurring soon after the removal of fake followers.

This article illustrates the trade-off between online work and leisure. We use the introduction of the widely played mobile game Pokémon Go to observe its impact on the online labour platform, Amazon Mechanical Turk. To measure whether a mobile game, for which players must physically go outside, affects the proportion of American workers on the platform, we create an index to measure the intensity of Pokémon Go use. This article highlights that American online workers, for whom Amazon Mechanical Turk is a secondary source of revenue, are susceptible to exploit the work-leisure trade-off on a daily basis. We have two main findings. First, we show that a one s.d. increase in the relative use of Pokémon Go leads to a daily decrease in the proportion of American workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk of 4.38 percentage points, corresponding to a decrease of up to 1,095 workers. Second, we find that an increase in the search for part-time jobs raises the proportion of American workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Connected devices using voice recognition as a form of input (Google Home, Amazon Echo, Apple Homepod) are increasingly popular. This mode of interaction introduces new possibilities to influence the user. How feasible is it for these devices to manipulate their audience, particularly children? This paper investigates the results of a lab-in-the-field experiment conducted in a French primary school in July 2019, where a smart speaker, a robot, and an adult were attempting to influence children in their choice of sharing marbles with other kids. We adapted a dictator game for the children audience and then estimated the impact of two different nudging strategies (Social Proximity and Peer-Effect) on the outcome of the dictator game. During the interaction with the children, the nudges were less effective when they were implemented by the adult as compared to the voice assistants, shedding light on the potential that these emerging devices have when it comes to manipulating their vulnerable audience.