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| Rishab Lodh and Oindrila Dey |
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| ''News or noise? Consumer susceptibility towards misinformation'' |
| ( 2026, Vol. 46 No.1 ) |
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| In the post-truth era, consumer awareness is considered a critical defense against the rapid dissemination of misinformation; however, ‘love for information' might induce consumers to overlook manipulative content, referred as ‘fear of missing out' (FOMO). In this paper, we probe if high-aware consumer experiencing FOMO can lead to more dissemination of misinformation? Categorizing consumer on traits like, ideological sensitivity and level of awareness, we derive the pooling equilibrium condition under which misinformation propagates in a signaling framework. The results reveal that while greater awareness reduces incidence of misinformation, presence of FOMO can offset this effect by relaxing the pooling equilibrium conditions. Unlike the extant literature, our findings highlight the need to integrate behavioral factors into misinformation-mitigation strategies |
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| Keywords: Misinformation, News Consumption, Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), Awareness, incomplete Information games |
JEL: D8 - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty: General
C7 - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory |
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| Manuscript Received : Nov 14 2025 | | Manuscript Accepted : Mar 30 2026 |
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