eprintid: 43424 rev_number: 7 eprint_status: archive userid: 15 dir: disk0/00/04/34/24 datestamp: 2021-04-30 11:59:53 lastmod: 2022-07-25 15:46:08 status_changed: 2021-04-30 11:59:53 type: thesis metadata_visibility: show creators_name: Sen, Ananya creators_idrefppn: 255088426 title: Essais en économie des médias ispublished: unpub subjects: subjects_ECO1 abstract: This thesis consists of three independent and self-contained chapters, all of which have the economics of the media or the internet as the common unifying theme. In Chapter I, we ask whether new technologies change the way political markets work in a democracy. We study the impact of adopting a new technology on campaign contributions received by candidates running for the U.S. Congress. To identify the causal impact of joining Twitter, we com- pare donations just before and just after politicians open an account in regions with high and low levels of Twitter penetration, controlling for politician-month fixed effects. We estimate that opening a Twitter account amounts to an increase of at least 2-3% in donations per campaign. Moreover, this effect holds only for inexperienced politicians who have never been elected to the Congress before. Placebo checks suggest that this impact is not driven by concurrent increase in information about these politicians in newspapers or blogs, TV ads, or campaign expenditures. The gain from opening a Twitter account is stronger for donations coming from new as opposed to repeat donors, for politicians who tweet more informatively, and for politicians from regions with lower newspaper circulation. Overall, our findings suggest that a new communication technology can lower the barriers to entry in political contests by increasing new politicians' opportunities of informing voters and fund-raising. In Chapter II, we ask if clicks received by news stories online, independent of story quality, influence the way editors allocate resources to them, and if so, how? Using a unique online news dataset from a large Indian English daily newspaper, we provide evidence that editors expand coverage of stories which receive more clicks initially. To establish a causal link between clicks and coverage, we use a novel instrumental variables strategy exploiting rainfall and power outages as exogenous shocks to reader access to online news. We find that the newspaper responds asymmetrically to clicks received by hard and soft news stories, giving additional coverage only to popular hard ones providing evidence for hard news crowding out soft news and not vice-versa. Finally, we relate our results to rm strategy and the challenge rms face in handling `big data'. In Chapter III, we examine whether a technology, such as the internet, which increases the set of products available to decision makers, may make the decision makers worse off. We build a model where there is product heterogeneity and decision makers can choose to screen products at a cost. In equilibrium, an increase in the choice set can lower a decision maker's payoff by raising the number of products which, on average, are of lower quality than those which were available earlier. An additional product can impose a negative externality on the decision maker by adversely a effecting the statistical quality of its existing product pool. We discuss applications to the phenomenon of attention congestion through advances in digital technology. date: 2016-09-30 official_url: http://www.theses.fr/2016TOU10074 alt_title: Essays in the Economics of the Media supervisors_name: Seabright, Paul supervisors_name: Crémer, Jacques thesis_id: 2016TOU10074 viva_location: Université Toulouse Capitole faculty: tse divisions: tse doctoral_school: mpse viva_date: 2016-09-30 french_keywords: Économie du travail french_keywords: Médias language: en has_fulltext: TRUE view_date_year: 2016 full_text_status: public harvester_local_overwrite: eprintid harvester_local_overwrite: userid harvester_local_overwrite: faculty harvester_local_overwrite: dir harvester_local_overwrite: site harvester_local_overwrite: type harvester_local_overwrite: ispublished harvester_local_overwrite: viva_date harvester_local_overwrite: date harvester_local_overwrite: official_url harvester_local_overwrite: doctoral_school harvester_local_overwrite: thesis_id harvester_local_overwrite: supervisors_name harvester_local_overwrite: publish_to_hal harvester_local_overwrite: creators_name harvester_local_overwrite: language harvester_local_overwrite: pending harvester_local_overwrite: french_keywords harvester_local_overwrite: viva_location harvester_local_overwrite: creators_idrefppn harvester_local_overwrite: divisions harvester_local_overwrite: title harvester_local_overwrite: abstract harvester_local_overwrite: alt_title harvester_local_overwrite: subjects site: ut1 publish_to_hal: FALSE citation: Sen, Ananya (2016) Essais en économie des médias. Toulouse School of Economics (Toulouse) . document_url: https://publications.ut-capitole.fr/id/eprint/43424/1/SenAnanya2016.pdf