Balcaen Pieter, Buts Caroline, Bois Cind Du, Tkacheva Olesya
The Royal Military Academy Hobbemastraat 184, 1000 Brussels, Belgium.
The Vrije Universiteit Brussel Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Elsene, Belgium.
J Behav Exp Econ. 2023 Feb;102:101968. doi: 10.1016/j.socec.2022.101968. Epub 2022 Dec 9.
Although the COVID-19 pandemic was accompanied by an infodemic about the origin of the virus and effectiveness of vaccines, little is known about the causal effect of this disinformation on the economy. This article fills in this void by examining the effects of disinformation about COVID-19 vaccines on consumer confidence by means of an original survey experiment in Dutch speaking communities of Belgium. Our findings show that the information set that impacts consumer confidence is much broader than previously assumed. We show that disinformation changes the perception of the effectiveness of vaccines which in turn indirectly impacts the future economic outlook, measured by the metric consumer confidence. Moreover, we find that the above effects are larger for respondents exposed to disinformation that is framed as containing 'scientific evidence' compared to 'conspiracy frames'.
尽管新冠疫情伴随着关于病毒起源和疫苗有效性的信息疫情，但对于这种虚假信息对经济的因果效应却知之甚少。本文通过在比利时荷语社区进行的一项原创调查实验，研究了关于新冠疫苗的虚假信息对消费者信心的影响，从而填补了这一空白。我们的研究结果表明，影响消费者信心的信息集比之前假设的要广泛得多。我们发现，虚假信息改变了对疫苗有效性的认知，进而间接影响了以消费者信心指标衡量的未来经济前景。此外，我们发现，与“阴谋论框架”相比，接触到被设定为包含“科学证据”的虚假信息的受访者，上述影响更大。
