Alice wants to find out more about this guy Bob she is supposed to meet again in half an hour. With the few bits of information she has, she tries an internet search. The first page of returns does not yield much ...

Sir Tim Berners Lee is worried about the spread of cult thinking over the web. When Cern, where he did his pioneering work on the web, turned on the Large Hadron Collider LHC in September 2008, fears about a black hole swallowing the Earth quickly spread over the internet. Other internet rumours hold that some harmless vaccines are dangerous to children.

Sir Tim considers the introduction of labels for trustworthiness of websites.

Information Economics treats important aspects of such labels. Chapter 6 discusses the economics of the supply of quality labels like credit ratings, Chapter 10 shows how misleading information can spread even among relatively rational individuals.

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