RESEARCH

This paper examines how digital content platforms can design signaling mechanisms to shape consumers' engagement with potentially fake content. Initially, the platform and consumers face uncertainty about content veracity, but the platform can conduct random inspections to verify it. Based on inspection results, the platform strategically sends signals to consumers. We investigate both public and private signaling policies to maximize revenue. Our findings show that the private policy consistently outperforms the public one; however, neither policy completely mitigates the spread of fake content. Specifically, the optimal public policy fails to signal fake content after a fixed time, whereas the optimal private policy signals fake content only to a subset of consumers. We explore various strategies to reduce the spread of fake content while ensuring profitability. We find that a consumer reporting system boosts the platform's profits but fails to curb the spread of fake content. Alternatively, our analysis suggests that implementing subscriptions and government penalties can effectively reduce fake content while enhancing the platform's revenue.

To succeed, news outlets must produce quality content on time. This poses a challenge for two reasons. First, breaking news is unpredictable, and the required journalistic work and associated cost vary from day to day, depending on the news. Second, news content is perishable and it cannot be written in advance. In this study, we investigate two strategies that news outlets use to manage their content production: the planned journalism strategy (creating feature articles held as inventory) and the content syndication strategy (reproducing news articles from external sources through revenue sharing). In this context, we model a news outlet's content production decisions as a dynamic program. We identify structural properties of optimal decisions and explore how the nature of the content relationship (substitutes or complements) influences these decisions. Interestingly, when feature articles and reproduced articles are complements, the adoption of one strategy may either discourage or encourage news outlets from implementing the other.