This paper examines how socio-economic characteristics, changes in the technology of political communication and their interactions affect the sentiments of the electorate and favor the spread of populist ideas in Europe. Using both European-wide and national surveys we find a significant...

Facebook pages are transforming how organizations and business market themselves and communicate with their audiences. Especially, small businesses are increasingly trying to adopt social media tools to market themselves and gain competitive advantage. The present case study introduces a social...

Newspapers are increasingly reliant on subscription revenue as advertising spend shifts to online platforms. Many newspapers have implemented paywalls in an attempt to boost subscription revenue. We study whether and how paywalls can help newspapers boost revenue by retaining existing...

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...

We exploit Facebook’s introduction of a filter hiding ads from the feed as a unique opportunity to study the effects of online ads on political behavior. In a pre-registered experiment, we randomly assigned participants to hide political ads (treatment) or alcohol ads (control) for several...

This chapter provides an overview of the economics of influencers and social media stardom. It provides the state-of-research regarding success factors, revenue and payment models, social media platforms and ecosystems, and welfare effects. It describes the role of social media content providers...

This article analyzes the impact of a local broadband expansion policy on electoral turnout and party vote share. We exploit a unique policy intervention involving staged broadband infrastructure installation across rural municipalities in the Province of Trento (Italy), thus generating a source...

The diffusion of social media coincided with a worsening of mental health conditions among adolescents and young adults in the United States, giving rise to speculation that social media might be detrimental to mental health. In this paper, we provide the first quasi-experimental estimates of...

This paper documents the extent of copying and estimates the returns to originality in online news production. We build a unique dataset combining all the online content produced by French news media during the year 2013 with new micro audience data. We develop a topic detection algorithm that...

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...