On search keywords with trademarked terms, the brand owner (“focal brand”) and other relevant firms compete for consumers. For the focal brand, paid clicks have a direct substitute in the organic links below the paid ad(s). The proximity of this substitute depends on whether competing firms...

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...

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...

We test for and measure the effects of cable news in the US on regional differences in compliance with recommendations by health experts to practice social distancing during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. We use a quasi-experimental design to estimate the causal effect of Fox News...

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:...