자료유형  

 학위논문

Control Number  

0016931703

International Standard Book Number  

9798379708443

Dewey Decimal Classification Number  

005

Main Entry-Personal Name  

Stalinski, Mateusz.

Publication, Distribution, etc. (Imprint  

[S.l.] : The University of Chicago., 2023

Publication, Distribution, etc. (Imprint  

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2023

Physical Description  

1 online resource(283 p.)

General Note  

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 84-12, Section: A.

General Note  

Advisor: Bursztyn, Leonardo.

Dissertation Note  

Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Chicago, 2023.

Restrictions on Access Note  

This item must not be sold to any third party vendors.

Restrictions on Access Note  

This item must not be added to any third party search indexes.

Summary, Etc.  

요약In my dissertation, composed of four essays, I apply field and online experiments to study preferences and decision making of economic agents in the context of challenges posed by digital platforms and contemporary political discourse. Specifically, the analysis offers evidence-based policy recommendations on several key topics: the regulation of social media political ads and their impact on electoral outcomes, moderation of speech on digital platforms, and mitigating political polarization. Additionally, I explore difficulties in applying basic behavioral effects in business and policy settings - I focus on the case study of the sunk cost effect, which is a natural candidate "bias" for digital platforms to leverage.In Chapter 1 (with George Beknazar-Yuzbashev), 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 weeks preceding the 2020 US elections. We report an insignificant intent-to-treat effect of political ads on turnout (2.3 pp.), but we cannot rule out a sizable positive effect, with 95% confidence interval of [-2.8,7.4]. The result may mask important heterogeneity, with political ads making Democrats slightly more motivated to vote and Republicans - substantially less. We explore the reasons for this effect, such as natural variation in ad content: the majority of Facebook ads on users' feeds skewed Democratic. Lastly, the effect on measures of affective polarization and informedness was negligible. In Chapter 2 (with George Beknazar-Yuzbashev, Rafael Jimenez-Duran, and Jesse McCrosky), we address the scarcity of causal evidence on how toxic content on social media impacts user engagement and whether it is contagious. In a pre-registered field experiment, we recruited participants to install a browser extension, and randomly assigned them to either a treatment group where the extension automatically hides toxic text content on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, or to a control group without hiding. As the first stage, 6.6% of the content displayed to users was classified as toxic by the extension relying on state-of-the-art toxicity detection tools, and duly hidden in the treatment group during a six-week long period. Lowering exposure to toxicity reduced content consumption on Facebook by 23% relative to the mean - beyond the mechanical effect of our intervention. We also report a 9.2% drop in ad consumption on Twitter (relative to the mean), where this metric is available. Additionally, the intervention reduced the average toxicity of content posted by users on Facebook and Twitter, evidence of toxicity being contagious. Taken together, our results suggest a trade-off faced by platforms: they can curb users' toxicity at the expense of their content consumption.In Chapter 3 (with Dan Kashner), concerned that the blind adoption of opinions put forward by political parties and influential figures can sometimes be harmful, we grapple with the issue of preempting political polarization. Focusing on cases where the partisan gap on policy support has not yet arisen, we investigate whether its formation can be prevented by encouraging prior active engagement with non-partisan information. To address this question, we recruited N=851 Republicans for a study about net neutrality, an issue largely unfamiliar to the electorate. In a pre-registered experiment, we randomly changed the order in which the following two types of information were provided: (i) partisan, underscoring Republicans' opposition and Democrats' support, and (ii) non-partisan, where the participants evaluated factual arguments about the pros and cons of the policy. Despite holding total information constant, we find that those who saw the non-partisan block first donated 46% more to a charity advocating for net neutrality (p=0.001). Furthermore, as a robustness check, we provide evidence that the treatment effect on support for the issue persisted in an obfuscated follow-up study conducted several weeks after the intervention. In Chapter 4 (with George Beknazar-Yuzbashev and Sota Ichiba), we focus on the case study of the sunk cost effect and its potential for encouraging the usage of goods and services in business and policy-relevant settings. Despite being often discussed both in practice and academic circles, the sunk cost effect remains empirically elusive. Our model based on reference point dependence suggests that the traditional way of testing it - by assigning discounts - may not produce the desired effect. Instead, we evaluate the effect across the gain-loss divide by randomizing the price (low, medium, or high) of a ticket to enter a real-effort task and observing its effect on playtime. Despite a strong intervention - we varied the sunk cost by $2 for a 14-minute task - and the sample size of N=1,806, we find only a small effect (0.09 SD or 1.1 minutes). We offer a cautionary tale that applying even the most intuitive behavioral effects in policy settings might prove challenging. 

Subject Added Entry-Topical Term  

Web studies.

Subject Added Entry-Topical Term  

Political science.

Index Term-Uncontrolled  

Behavioral economics

Index Term-Uncontrolled  

Experimental economics

Index Term-Uncontrolled  

Political economy

Index Term-Uncontrolled  

Political polarization

Index Term-Uncontrolled  

Social media

Index Term-Uncontrolled  

Toxic content

Added Entry-Corporate Name  

The University of Chicago Economics

Host Item Entry  

Dissertations Abstracts International. 84-12A.

Host Item Entry  

Dissertation Abstract International

Electronic Location and Access  

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Control Number  

joongbu:643029