Social media , information , knowledge , spillovers , networks , natural experiment
Abstract:
I quantify spillovers of attention in a network of content pages, which is challenging,
because such networks form endogenously. I exploit exogenous variation in the
article network of German Wikipedia to circumvent this problem. Wikipedia prominently
advertises one featured article on its main site every day, which increases
viewership of the advertised article. Shifts in the viewership of adjacent articles are
due to their link from the treated article. Through this approach I isolate how the
link network causally influences users’ search and contribution behavior.
I use a difference-in-differences analysis to estimate how attention spills to neighbors
through the transient shock of advertisement. I further develop an extended
peer effects model which relaxes the requirement of an exogenously given network.
This model enables the estimation of the underlying spillover. Advertisements affect
neighboring articles substantially: Their viewership increases by almost 70
percent. This, in turn, translates to increased editing activity. Attention is the
driving mechanism behind views and short edits. Both outcomes are related to the
order of links, while more substantial edits are not.
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