Research on trolls is scarce, but their activities challenge online communities; one of the main challenges of the Wikipedia community is to fight against vandalism and trolls. This study identifies Wikipedia trolls' behaviours and motivations, and compares and contrasts hackers with trolls; it extends our knowledge about this type of vandalism and concludes that Wikipedia trolls are one type o...

Recently, Web forums have been invaded by opinion manipulation trolls. Some trolls try to influence the other users driven by their own convictions, while in other cases they can be organized and paid, e.g., by a political party or a PR agency that gives them specific instructions what to write. Finding paid trolls automatically using machine learning is a hard task, as there is no enough train...

Patent trolls—firms that appropriate profits from innovation by enforcing patents against infringers—are peculiar players on markets for technologies. As buyers of patents, they are solely interested in the exclusion right, not in the underlying knowledge. Similarly, when they sell or license out patents, the transaction does not involve a technology transfer. In this paper, we empirically anal...

Trolling’ refers to a specific type of malicious online behaviour, intended to disrupt interactions, aggravate interactional partners and lure them into fruitless argumentation. However, as with other categories, both ‘troll’ and ‘trolling’ may have multiple, inconsistent and incompatible meanings, depending upon the context in which the term is used and the aims of the person using the term. D...

In the editorial published in the journal of Radiation Protection Dosimetry, Tommasino, Falk and Fujimoto (2003:104, 99-100) proved that Pinocchio, Tengu and Trolls, thanks to their long noses, are very able to protect themselves from thoron exposure. The present paper is aimed at a more ambitious goal, which is to prove that Pinocchio, Tengu and Trolls are also very able to measure thoron (plu...

There are different definitions of what a troll is. Certainly, a troll can be somebody who teases people to make them angry, or somebody who offends people, or somebody who wants to dominate any single discussion, or somebody who tries to manipulate people’s opinion (sometimes for money), etc. The last definition is the one that dominates the public discourse in Bulgaria and Eastern Europe, and...

Until recently, social media was seen to promote democratic discourse on social and political issues. However, this powerful communication platform has come under scrutiny for allowing hostile actors to exploit online discussions in an attempt to manipulate public opinion. A case in point is the ongoing U.S. Congress investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election campaign, with...

The fundamental idea of patent systems is to protect inventors who have invested resources during the development of their invention. Patent trolls abuse these systems by filing obvious patents with significantly less cost and usually without the intention to produce or offer the invention. Instead, patent trolls sue other companies that allegedly violate their obvious patents. We propose a met...

I introduce and analyze an equilibrium model of invention, patenting and infringement under monopolistic competition. Profitable use of inventions requires adaptation to complementary technologies. With patents, a thicket of conflicting rights emerges and costly infringements occur. This taxes invention and lowers welfare. When an inventor may be a “troll”—patent without inventing—the rate of i...