News consumers in many authoritarian countries read government-controlled sources even when independent sources are available. We test whether these choices reflect a preference for pro-government coverage versus persistent tastes for specific websites. We exploit textual data from news...

We measure the effectiveness of competitive advertising on brand search using alarge-scale, quasi-experimental ad allocation on Bing. Competitors are able to stealtraffic from the focal brand, and they steal an order of magnitude more clicks if the focalbrand's link is exogenously removed from...

We measure the relative importance of suspense and surprise in the entertainment preferences of viewers of Twitch.tv, the largest online video game streaming platform. Using detailed viewership and game statistics data from broadcasts of tournaments of a popular video game, Counter-Strike:...

In the months before the 2020 U.S. election, several campaign websites added pre-checked boxes (defaults), automatically making donations into recurring weekly contributions unless donors unchecked them. Since these changes occurred at different times for different campaigns, we measure the...

To what extent do mass media outlets influence viewers' trust in scientific evidence and compliance with behavior recommended by scientific experts? Exploiting the US lock-down period of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, we analyze a large longitudinal database that combines daily...