arXiv subjects

Yasir Zaki

Publications and source records attributed to Yasir Zaki.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Price Dislocations, News Citations, and Epistemic Leverage on Polymarket

Prediction-market probabilities increasingly appear in news coverage, yet little is known about which market movements become news or how much trading money sits behind the numbers journalists quote. Unlike a poll, a market price can be moved by anyone willing to trade, so the cost of manufacturing a number that circulates as news bears directly on the information environment. We link 173.7 million signed Polymarket trades to news coverage from 2024-2025. From 6,990 articles mentioning prediction-market venues, an LLM-based, human-validated matcher extracts 1,582 sentences quoting market odds and attributes 918 to the specific market whose price they cite. We then detect 44,976 price dislocations, movements of at least five percentage points backed by concentrated one-sided trading, and ask whether a market is cited more often afterward. In the days after a dislocation, a market's citation rate is about 33% higher than its matched baseline (log citation-rate ratio $τ_{\mathrm{cite}}=0.283$, permutation $p=0.001$), robust to binary and Poisson count outcomes. Yet move size is not the strongest predictor of citation: prominence dominates (standardized $β=0.610$ vs. $β=0.159$ for move size). Finally, we combine the dollar flow behind a given price change with observed citation rates into a metric we call epistemic leverage, the dollars needed to move a market five points and have the move cited. It stays near \$0.7-1.0 million across prominence quintiles, because cheaper-to-move markets are proportionally less likely to be cited. The implied threat model centers not on the long tail of cheaply moved markets but on the few prominent markets newsrooms treat as informational infrastructure, where a seven-figure price of influence sits within the budgets of actors with a large stake in the quoted number. We release aggregate event-study data and validation materials.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2026

On-Screen Inertia: Persistent Racial and Gender Disparities in Hollywood Film (1900-2024)

Hollywood has diversified its casts. Whether this has translated into structural change in how those actors are positioned within narratives remains largely unexamined. Drawing on 76,815 U.S. English-language films (1900-2024) and over 3.1 million cast and crew entries, we move beyond headcounts to examine long-term inclusion trends through network centrality, occupational stereotypes, crew-to-cast diversity pathways, and financial outcomes. We find evidence of what we term on-screen inertia. While the raw inclusion of women and racial minorities has increased modestly, White actors have become more overrepresented relative to the U.S. Census in recent decades, not less. Within the visibility layer, women face a consistent longevity penalty with significantly shorter careers than men, and visual depictions framing men as dominant and women as sensual have remained stable since the 1950s. Structurally, White actors retain disproportionate network centrality; women achieve parity in centrality and lead billing yet cluster in secondary co-lead roles; and occupational stereotypes anchoring racial and gender groups to specific labor categories persist largely unchanged across the pre- and post-2000 periods. Crew diversity associates with cast inclusion only along matching demographic lines (i.e., racial with racial, gender with gender) and does not extend to narrative centrality, revealing a structural ceiling on hiring-based interventions. Critically, we find no consistent market penalty for diversity across decades of box office returns and audience ratings, eliminating the primary rationalization for these practices. Together, these findings demonstrate that Hollywood's representational inequalities are not a rational market response, but are an institutionally sustained choice.

cs.CY↗