Thiemo Fetzer | Professor of Economics

Month: April 2026

  • Attention Markets, Reward Curvature, and the Case for De-Weaponizing the Information Sphere

    I wanted to share a longer reflection that connects a few threads I have been working on over the past years: narratives, validation, platform competition, and the political economy of information systems. This is drawing partially on slides from the SHAPER keynote from 2023. The immediate trigger for this is a line of thought I…

  • When “Social Listening” Stopped Being Social

    I wanted to share some reflections on the phrase “social listening” because the term has always bothered me a bit, and increasingly so. For a long time, social listening referred to something quite literal: asking people what they think and listening to their answers. Opinion polls, phone interviews, enumerator-led surveys, and focus groups were not…