Welcome to the site of the research project "Information, Fake News, and Social Networks", funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).  Over the last two decades, the digital revolution has fundamentally changed the way people consume news.  These developments have facilitated the spreading of "fake news" and disinformation, in particular on social media. In this project, we thoroughly investigate strategic communication in uncertain environments to develop a comprehensive theory of fake news and disinformation.

Featured in Deutschlandfunk - Systemfragen and Bielefeld University‘s research_tv (Youtube).

Research

Working Papers

Sequential information selling: Perfect price discrimination and the role of encryption, with Fynn Närmann. Center for Mathematical Economics Working Paper, June 2025.

We study a seller who sequentially offers experiments to a consumer and show by means of an encryption protocol how perfect price discrimination may be feasible despite buyers’ valuations being different. 

Strategic communication of narratives, Gerrit Bauch and Manuel Foerster. arXiv Working Paper, July 2025. 

We model the communication of narratives as a cheap-talk game under model uncertainty. We introduce a general class of ambiguity rules resolving the receiver's ignorance of the true data generating process and characterize equilibria by means of an algorithm. 

Featured by Bielefeld University‘s research_tv (Youtube).

Strategic use of social media influencer marketing, Manuel Foerster, Tim Hellmann  and Fernando Vega-Redondo. SSRN Working Paper, April 2024. 

We build a model of social media influencer marketing and investigate the industrial organization of the influencer economy.

A theory of media bias and disinformation, Manuel Foerster. SSRN Working Paper, October 2023. 

In a model of media bias that captures several stylized facts about today’s (digital) news industry, we investigate the effect of competition on disinformation and consumer behavior.

Publications

Strategic transmission of imperfect information: why revealing evidence (without proof) is difficult. International Journal of Game Theory, 52, 1291-1316, 2023, doi:10.1007/s00182-023-00848-1. 

We show that soft evidence is more prone to manipulation than one might think and provide a rationale for simple grade ratings.

Work in Progress

Strategic communication of narratives: An experiment, Gerrit Bauch,  Arthur Dolgopolov, and Manuel Foerster.

Robust communication of narratives, Gerrit Bauch and Manuel Foerster.

A model of strategic information sharing on social media, Manuel Foerster and Fynn Louis Närmann.

How an ambiguous distribution of receiver beliefs reduces disinformation, Fynn Louis Närmann.

This research project has been granted to Manuel Foerster by the German Research Foundation (DFG) via grant FO 1272/2-1 in 2020.