In Friedrich Durrenmatt's play "The Visit of the Old Lady", Claire Zachanassian, old and immensely rich, returns to her home town of Güllen and shocks citizens of this sleazy place with an unsavory offer. She publicly promises a bounty of one billion to be divided among the town's treasury and its citizens under the condition that Alfred Ill dies. Alfred was her early love, but he let her down when she became pregnant, and Claire finally left Güllen. Now, after surviving eight rich husbands, the old lady exacts her revenge ...

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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