Fake News, Artificial Intelligence, and Transaction Costs: From Misinformation to Regulation
Author:Cosmin Marinescu and Karina Ochiș
JEL:F53, F55, F59.
DOI:10.24818/EA/2026/73/1114
Keywords:fake news, transaction cost economics, governance, artificial intelligence, regulation, globalization, international relations.
Abstract:
The article extends transaction cost economics (TCE) into artificial intelligence (AI)-mediated information markets, specifically AI-regulated fake news. It reframes AI‑generated fake news as a transaction‑cost asymmetry problem in which AI compresses production and coordination costs for deceptive actors while raising evaluation and compliance burdens for legitimate ones. Regulatory responses introduce additional imposed costs through compliance, auditing, and transparency requirements, but these are distributed unevenly across actors. A conceptual comparative analysis of the United States, China, and the European Union demonstrates that different AI governance architectures generate distinct market transaction costs (MTCs)—arising from voluntary exchange under uncertainty—and imposed transaction costs (ITCs)—generated by regulatory intervention. It is argued that using the two categories of transaction costs is a useful prerequisite for developing AI regulations that address AI-mediated fake news, particularly in the EU’s more legalist and bureaucratic framework, compared with the US’s liberal and competitive or China’s state-led, dual-use regulatory frameworks. It is further argued that, from a TCE perspective, EU AI regulatory development would benefit from a greater focus on reducing market transaction costs rather than increasing imposed transaction costs. It concludes that effective AI governance, which affects fake news, depends not on regulatory intensity alone but on how institutional mechanisms distribute transaction costs among market actors. The study is designed as a qualitative analysis, grounded in a conceptual and institutional-comparative approach, suited to a field in which normative architectures and governance mechanisms are more analytically relevant than aggregate quantitative measurement. The analytical framework rests on transaction cost economics, in which the distinction between market transaction costs (MTCs) and imposed transaction costs (ITCs) functions as the central methodological instrument. The review was conducted by consulting secondary sources and the specialized literature at the intersection of artificial intelligence, fake news, and transaction costs, and the bibliographic mapping revealed that analysing AI-mediated fake news from a transaction-cost perspective is an under-investigated field, which grounded the necessity of the present study.