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PUBLICATIONS

A Model of Harmful yet Engaging Content on Social Media

With Rafael Jiménez-Durán and Mateusz Stalinski

AEA Papers and Proceedings, 114 (2024): 678-83

Most social media users have encountered harassment online, but there is scarce evidence of how this type of toxic content impacts engagement. In a pre-registered browser extension field experiment, we randomly hid toxic content for six weeks on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Lowering exposure to toxicity reduced advertising impressions, time spent, and other measures of engagement, and reduced the toxicity of user-generated content. A survey experiment provides evidence that toxicity triggers curiosity and that engagement and welfare are not necessarily aligned. Taken together, our results suggest that platforms face a trade-off between curbing toxicity and increasing engagement.

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Do Social Media Ads Matter for Political Behavior? A Field Experiment

With Mateusz Stalinski

Journal of Public Economics, 214 (2022): 104735

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.

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WORKING PAPERS

Toxic Content and User Engagement on Social Media: Evidence from a Field Experiment

With Rafael Jiménez-Durán, Mateusz Stalinski, and Jesse McCrosky

SSRN

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To the Depths of the Sunk Cost: Experiments Revisiting the Elusive Effect

With Sota Ichiba and Mateusz Stalinski

SSRN

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. Motivated by this, we evaluate it across the gain-loss divide in two pre-registered experiments. In an online study, we randomize the price (low, medium, or high) of a ticket to enter a real-effort task and observe its effect on play time. Despite varying the sunk cost by $2 for a 14-minute task and the sample size of N=1,806, we detect only a small effect (0.09 SD or 1.1 minutes). We further explore the economic applications of the effect in a field experiment on YouTube with N=11,328 videos in which we randomize whether the time until a pre-video ad becomes skippable is shortened (0 s), default (5 s), or extended (10 s). The intervention has an overall insignificant effect on video engagement. This is driven by a sizable negative effect on the extensive margin, a channel which is not present in the online study. Specifically, more users leave before the video starts in the extended treatment (5.2 pp. or 28% more relative to the shortened treatment). Taking the results of both studies together, we offer a cautionary tale that applying even the most intuitive behavioral effects in policy settings can prove challenging.

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