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This study employs the full public Twitter information operations archive and its nearly 90,000 accounts from at least 22 actors to examine one particular element of the strategies employed by state-backed influence actors—strategic use of place claims. Academic research exploring state-affiliated social media influence operations has, to date, focused on one or a handful of campaigns. We argue this focus has the potential to miss tactics and strategies other nations' operations may be effectively using. Specifically, we examine account self-identified place claims to build an understanding of when and why these strategies are employed, and how these place claims relate to campaign targeting of specific populations. We examine where accounts claim to be located and how these claims relate to what we know about the targeting of each campaign. We also explore what other account behaviors are correlated with accounts' use of specific place claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a model of a competitive industry selling base goods and add-ons, we investigate the conditions under which citizen-consumers will support policies that eliminate behavioral inefficiencies induced by naïve consumers. Unregulated competitive markets have two effects: they produce deadweight losses, and they redistribute income away from biased consumers. Both unbiased and naïve consumers believe that they benefit from this redistribution (the naïve consumers are wrong), so support for efficiency-improving regulation is limited. Extending our model to consumers with partial sophistication about their naïveté, we predict patterns of regulation consistent with the form and timing of the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act of 2009. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public sector agencies are an important front in the day-to-day battle for political supremacy between the executive and the legislature. The executive's key agents in this conflict are his appointees, who frequently play one of two roles: Congressional allies, where they help Congress implement policy and Congressional adversaries, where they fight with Congress to shift policy strongly toward the executive. This article studies how these two roles arise and what implications they have for administrative policymaking. It highlights how intrinsically motivated bureaucrats combined with hierarchical control affect the ability of the political principals to control the execution of policy. I explore how this interaction shifts under alternative institutional forms, and how it leads appointees to “go native.” The model makes several predictions concerning Congressional oversight of bureaucratic agencies. An empirical analysis of audit reports released by the Government Accountability Office finds patterns of oversight consistent with these predictions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]