Economic Perspectives on Free Speech

Abstract

Abstract This chapter explores the potential for economic analysis to illuminate freedom of speech. For early scholars of law and economics, the similarities and differences between the metaphorical marketplace for ideas and literal markets for goods and services were subjects of much attention. The chapter then argues that information economics has the potential to explain failures in the ‘marketplace of ideas’. Just as information asymmetry in the market for goods and services allows low quality goods and services to drive high quality goods and services out of the marketplace, there is reason to think that ‘bad speech’ will tend to drive out the ‘good’. For good information to compete in the market, readers and listeners must be able to tell the difference between good and bad information—an idea with particular resonance in the age of ‘fake news’, and with potential implications for the design of free-speech laws.