This article reviews recent theoretical contributions on digital piracy. It starts by elaborating on the reasons for intellectual property protection, by reporting a few facts about copyright protection, and by examining reasons to become a digital pirate. Next, it provides an exploration of the...

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 -...

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...

Does advertising revenue increase or diminish content differentiation in media markets? This paper shows that an increase in the technically feasible number of ad breaks per video leads to an increase in content differentiation between several thousand YouTube channels. I exploit two...

We review the economics of superstars, originally developed for stars in traditional media, and discuss whether they are applicable for the (allegedly) novel phenomenon of stars in social media (influencer, micro-celebrities). Moreover, we analyse potentially new factors for creating social...

This paper studies the effect of advertising on content differentiation on YouTube, the second-most visited website in the world. I demonstrate that an exogenous increase in the feasible advertising quantity leads to a considerable decrease in the YouTubers' probability to duplicate mainstream...

We investigate the effect of social media endorsements (likes, retweets, shares) on individuals' policy preferences. In two online controlled experiments (N=1,384), we exposed participants to non-neutral policy messages about the COVID-19 pandemic (emphasizing either public health or economic...

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...