Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/106515 
Authors: 
Year of Publication: 
2014
Series/Report no.: 
ZEW Discussion Papers No. 14-132
Publisher: 
Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung (ZEW), Mannheim
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.
Subjects: 
Social Media
Information
Knowledge
Spillovers
Networks
Natural Experiment
JEL: 
L17
D62
D85
D29
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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