Guru Dreams and Competition: An Anatomy of the Economics of Blogs

Abstract

The rise of social media has encouraged guru dreams because of the low entry barrier and highly skewed distribution of public attention that characterize social media. The pursuit of guru status, however, may be achieved through information provision or cheap talk, and competition inherent to social media may incentivize participants to either process better information or express more extreme options. Using a unique dataset of blogs covering S&P 1500 stocks over the 2006-2011 period, we find evidence that social media can be informative about future stock returns but that competition distorts opinions rather than encouraging participants to process better information. In particular, competition induces exaggerated negative tones in blogs, which is unrelated to information. Our results suggest that social media may provide mixed incentives for its participants in terms of information efficiency.