We use the German Job Vacancy Survey to investigate whether firms are able to attract more suitable applicants by offering bargain wages rather than posting fixed wages. Contrary to the theoretical predictions provided by the literature, we find that the offer to bargain over pay decreases the...

We review the burgeoning literature on the economics of social media, which has become ubiquitous in the modern economy and fundamentally changed how people interact. We first define social media platforms and isolate the features that distinguish them from traditional media and other digital...

In this study, we propose a novel approach to detect supply-side media bias, independent of external factors like ownership or editors' ideological leanings. Analyzing over 100,000 articles from The New York Times (NYT) and The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), complemented by data from 22 million...

This study investigates the effects of variation in "congeniality" of news on Facebook user engagement (likes, shares, and comments). We compile an original data set of Facebook posts by 84 German news outlets on politicians that were investigated for criminal offenses from January 2012 to June...

Social media are at the center of countless debates on polarization, misinformation, and even the state of democracy in various parts of the world. An essential feature of social media is the ranking algorithm that determines how content is presented to the users. This paper studies the dynamic...

We conduct a randomized survey experiment to compare the short- and longer-term effects of fact checking to a brief media literacy intervention. We show that the impact of fact checking is limited to the corrected fake news, whereas media literacy helps to distinguish between false and correct...

The importance of user-generated content is growing as media consumption is moving online; yet, investigations of media bias on user-generated content platforms are rare. We develop a novel procedure to detect coverage bias – i.e., bias in the amount of coverage certain topics or issues receive...

We present a new measure for the political position of news outlets based on politicians' selective sharing of news items. Politicians predominantly share news items that are in line with their political position, hence, one can infer the political position of news outlets from the politicians'...

We study peer influence in an online social network on a platform where consumers purchase music albums. They can follow their peers and become informed about their consumption choices. In particular, we are interested in how this affects consumers’ exploration of new music that exhibits...

We propose a theory of protest dynamics with heterogeneous protest technology and intensity. The ability to mobilize online reduces the likelihood of coordination failures at both the extensive (engagement) and intensive (violence) margins. Social media can initially help launch massive...