> Influencer cartels can improve consumer welfare if they expand social media engagement to the target audience > Back-of-the-envelope calculations (based on re

> Influencer cartels can improve consumer welfare if they expand social media engagement to the target audience > Back-of-the-envelope calculations (based on regression analysis) show that if advertisers pay for cartel engagement as if it were natural engagement, they receive only 3–18% of the value with general cartels, and 60–85% with topic cartels. First, users don't benefit from cartel engagement at all. The authors have forgotten to factor in opportunity costs of 100%. A "85% good" engagement that pushes a 100% engagement from my feed costs me 15%. This is plainly obvious by, well, the need to form a cartel in the first place. Second, the authors define both good engagement and topic cartels by comment similarity. You can't get any other result other than that topic cartels beat general cartels. Third, the column uses stuffy language. Write clearly and you spot mistakes such as one and two more easily. Fourth, as a regular app user I regard everything influencer-shilled as negative welfare – but that's just my opinion.