This dissertation advances a descriptive claim: **deception is not an aberration within market economies but a structurally rewarded strategy, made profitable by the same information asymmetries that markets are supposed to resolve.** Drawing on information economics, behavioral economics, institutional theory, and the political economy of digital platforms, I argue that markets exist in a *parasitic equilibrium* — deception continuously extracts value from a reservoir of trust that it simultaneously depletes, while countervailing institutions (reputation, regulation, repeat interaction) continuously replenish it. This equilibrium is unstable but self-limiting: total deception is impossible because it destroys the trust it feeds on. The dissertation's contribution is to show that the digital attention and data economy has industrialized deception — converting it from an artisanal, per-transaction practice into a scalable, personalized, algorithmically optimized system — thereby shifting the equilibrium and stressing the institutions that historically contained it.