Table 4 Treatment effects based on prior beliefs

From: Companies inadvertently fund online misinformation despite consumer backlash

 

Posterior platform belief

Platform solution demand

Certain

Uncertain

Certain

Uncertain

1

2

3

4

Treatment

39.98**

144.25**

−0.07

0.36***

(20.23)

(60.23)

(0.06)

(0.13)

0.049

0.022

0.213

0.008

Controls

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Control group mean

90.23

80.80

0.37

0.43

Observations

286

68

286

68

  1. OLS regression results for the sub-sample of participants who reported ‘No’ to the question “Do you think your company or organization had its advertisements appear on misinformation websites during the past three years (2019–2021)?” (n = 354). Columns are numbered along the top. The dependent variables are posterior beliefs (columns 1 and 2) and demand for platform solution (columns 3 and 4) from Table 3. Columns 1 and 3 show results for participants who report being certain about their response to the question—that is, choosing ‘Somewhat sure’, ‘Sure’ or ‘Very sure’ (n = 286). Column 4 shows results for participants who report being uncertain about their response to the question—that is, choosing ‘Unsure’ or ‘Very unsure’ (n = 68). Results for the sample including inattentive respondents are shown in Supplementary Table 15. No adjustments were made for multiple comparisons. Robust standard errors are shown in parentheses. P values derived from two-sided t-tests are reported below the standard errors.
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