Fake News, Investor Attention, and Market Reaction

Information Systems and Operations Management

Speaker : Yu "Jeffrey" HU

The Sharon A. and David B. Pearce Professor   

Scheller College of Business, Georgia Institute of Technology  

HEC Campus - Jouy-En-Josas - Buil. V - Room Bernard Ramanantsoa

Abstract:

Does fake news in financial markets attract more investor attention and have a significant impact on stock prices? We use the SEC crackdown of stock promotion schemes in April 2017 to examine investor attention and the stock price reaction to fake news articles. Using data from Seeking Alpha, we find that fake news stories generate significantly more attention than a control sample of legitimate articles. We find no evidence that article commenters can detect fake news and Seeking Alpha editors have only modest ability to detect fake news. The broader stock market appears to price fake news correctly. The stock price reaction to the release of fake news is not significantly different than a matched control sample over short and longer-term windows. The abnormal volume reaction to the release of fake news is also less than a matched control sample. We show that machine learning algorithms can successfully identify fake news articles.

Bio:

Yu “Jeffrey” Hu is the Sharon A. and David B. Pearce Professor, Director of China Program, Co-Director of Business Analytics Center, and Associate Director of Master of Science in Analytics Program at the Scheller College of Business at Georgia Institute of Technology. He is also a Digital Fellow at MIT’s Initiative on Digital Economy and the Chief Data Science Advisor at Winner Technology. Dr. Hu received a Ph.D. in Management Science and Information Technology from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, a M.S. in Economics from University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a B.S. in Finance from Tsinghua University. He is an expert on big data, business analytics, consumer behavior, electronic commerce, mobile commerce, offline commerce, social media, and online advertising. He coauthored the first paper discovering the "Long Tail" phenomenon in Internet markets and the first paper proving the value of social media content in predicting stock markets.

He has been an expert or consultant for governments from around the world, including being a digital economy expert for the U.S. Government, being an electronic commerce development strategy expert for the European Commission, writing an expert report on mobile Internet development strategy for the Chinese Government. He has been an expert, advisor, consultant, or research project leader, for many large companies around the world, including Amazon, HP, Bank of America, AT&T, Coca-Cola, InterContinental Hotels Group, Pearson, China Mobile, Tencent WeChat, Alibaba Taobao, and a number of other technology, retail, pharmaceutical companies. He has designed and taught in executive education programs for many company top decision-makers, company executives, and government officials, including those in Tsinghua University’s Finance EMBA Program, the Federal Reserve, Bank of America, China Mobile, Bank of Communications.

His research has been published in top journals such as Management Science, Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, Review of Financial Studies, MIT Sloan

Management Review. His research has been discussed extensively and cited by media outlets such as Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Reuters, Bloomberg, TIME Magazine, InformationWeek, Wired Magazine, INC. Magazine, National Public Radio, etc. His papers have been adopted for classroom use by many top universities in the world. He has won several research awards including the inaugural Management Science Best Paper Award in Information Systems.