Scholars have argued that online social networks and personalized web search increase ideological segregation. We investigate the impact of these potentially polarizing channels on news consumption by examining web browsing histories for 50,000 U.S.-located users who regularly read online news. We find that individuals indeed exhibit substantially higher segregation when reading articles shared...

This paper presents a theory of the market provision of broadcasting and uses it to address the nature of market failure in the industry. Advertising levels may be too low or too high, depending on the relative sizes of the nuisance cost to viewers and the expected benefits to advertisers from contacting viewers. Market provision may allocate too few or too many resources to programming and the...

Music industry is “facing the music” now. Big stakeholders try very hard to maintain their positions while other players see opportunities in the advent of peer-to-peer networks. Music, as a kind of representative information good, deserves its economic properties to be examined and made explicit. Using the familiar Hotelling (1929) model of product differentiation, I show that the current musi...

We conducted a field experiment to measure the effect of exposure to newspapers on political behavior and opinion. Before the 2005 Virginia gubernatorial election, we randomly assigned individuals to a Washington Post free subscription treatment, a Washington Times free subscription treatment, or control. We find no effect of either paper on political knowledge, stated opinions or turnout in po...

In this paper I exploit the removal of Warner Music content from YouTube in January 2009, and its restoration in October 2009, as a plausible natural experiment to investigate the impact of online content availability on album sales. I find that the blackout on YouTube had both statistically and economically significant positive effects on Warner albums, which are quickly moderated as top-selli...

The optimal allocation of resources in complex environments—like allocation of dynamic wireless spectrum, cloud computing services, and Internet advertising—is computationally challenging even given the true preferences of the participants. In the theory and practice of optimization in complex environments, a wide variety of special and general purpose algorithms have been developed; these algo...

We compare the advertising intensity and content of programming in a market with competing media platforms. With pay-tv media platforms have two sources of revenues, advertising revenues and revenues from viewers. With free-to-air media platforms receive all revenues from advertising. We show that if viewers strongly dislike advertising, the advertising intensity is greater under free-to-air te...

The number of Internet news media outlets has grown rapidly in recent years. This paper analyzes the effects of media proliferation on electoral outcomes and social welfare. We assume voters are information-seeking but choose outlets that are excessively partisan given the voters’ own ideological preferences, due to quasi-rationality. We find that if voters who think (correctly or not) that the...

In two-sided markets, two groups of agents interact through platforms. Because agents’ decision to join a platform is affected by the presence on other side, their interactions create indirect network externalities and make platforms’ strategies different from those firms in one-sided markets. this paper, I use structural model show that platforms may take loss one side market profit mergers be...

We provide quasi-experimental estimates of the impact social media on mental health by leveraging a unique natural experiment: staggered introduction Facebook across US colleges. Our analysis couples data student around years Facebook’s expansion with generalized difference-in-differences empirical strategy. find that rollout at college had negative health. It also increased likelihood which st...