Essays on spillover effects in digital media

In this thesis, I address spillover effects in digital media across 3 different essays. In Chapter 1, I focus on estimating social spillovers in the consumption of online news. Exploiting regional rainfall as a natural experiment, I find strong statistical evidence of positive social spillovers in consumption of online New York Times content. Specifically, I find that a 1% increase in aggregate viewership outside of a focal region causes viewership in that region to increase by approximately 0.34%. Further analysis shows that these spillover effects are skewed toward the most popular content and are driven by social media sharing rather than search engines or news aggregators. In Chapter 2, I estimate the spillover effect of paid advertising on organic mobile app installations. I analyze a spend shutoff "experiment" conducted by GameSpace, a major US-based mobile game developer.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Sloan School of Management

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Zhao, MichaelPh. D.Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Sinan Aral.

• Sloan School of Management.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/129362

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/129362