“Engagement vs. Commitment: The Economic Trade-Offs of Polarizing News Content,” Klaus Miller скачать в хорошем качестве

“Engagement vs. Commitment: The Economic Trade-Offs of Polarizing News Content,” Klaus Miller

PLAMADISO Talk by Klaus Miller (HEC Paris) – 20 November 2025 || Organized by the Research Group “Digital Economy, Internet Ecosystem & Internet Policy” @Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society   Title “#Engagement vs. #Commitment: The Economic Trade-Offs of #Polarizing News #Content” Abstract We study how polarizing content shapes two economic outcomes on a major European news website: engagement (time on site) We study how polarizing content shapes two economic outcomes on a major European news website: engagement (time on site) and commitment (paid subscriptions). Using advances in natural language processing, we construct deep-learning and large-language-model-based textual measures of polarization tailored to a multiparty system. We combine comprehensive supply and demand data—the full publisher-wide article inventory with user-level clicks and subscription outcomes—to track how consumers interact with polarizing articles. To identify causal effects, we use two theoretically distinct instruments: (i) a Bartik-style design that interacts users’ stable topic preferences with weekly shifts in the supply of polarizing content; and (ii) an election shock that raises political salience for a subset of readers. We document a “polarization trap”: exogenous increases in exposure to polarizing content raise engagement (time on site) but reduce the probability of subscribing. The negative subscription effect is driven more by the affective than the ideological dimension of polarization and is strongest during high-salience political periods. These results imply a strategic trade-off for publishers: content that maximizes short-run attention can undermine the formation of a loyal, paying subscriber base. Check out the current working paper here (joint work with Shunyao Yan from Santa Clara University): https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...   Short Bio I am an Assistant Professor in the Marketing Department at HEC Paris and a Chairholder at the Hi!PARIS Center on Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence for Science, Business and Society.  I joined from Goethe University in Frankfurt in 2021.  My research interests meet at the interface between empirical quantitative marketing, management economics, and information systems - specifically, my research focuses on online advertising and privacy issues in the digital economy.  During my Ph.D., as a post-doctoral scholar and afterward, I have been a frequent visiting scholar at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. My research has been published in top-tier academic journals such as the Journal of Marketing Research and the International Journal of Research in Marketing, as well as management-oriented journals. In my research projects, I often collaborate with the industry to answer research questions at scale.  In 2017, I was nominated as a Junior Faculty Consortium Fellow at the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), and in 2022, I was nominated as an ISMS Early-Career Scholar. From 2019-2025, I am a co-investigator on an European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant studying the impact of Online Tracking Restrictions on the Online Advertising Market.  I received the IJRM Best Paper Award 2024 for my work on the Economic Consequences of Online Tracking Restrictions published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing (IJRM). Alongside Yufei Shen and Xitong Li, I was honored with the Enginius Doctoral Dissertation Award (2nd Place) at EMAC 2024.  I am a co-organizer of the YES Marketing Meeting 2025 at HEC Paris and the Paris Digital Economics Conference 2026,  an annual event that brings together researchers on the economics of digital platforms and technology markets.  More about Klaus Miller: Website: https://sites.google.com/view/klausmi... Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?... Stay tuned for future events: https://plamadiso.weizenbaum-institut.de Follow us on X: https://x.com/JWI_Digi_Econ Follow us on LinkedIn:   / plamadiso   Find all PLAMADISO Talks in our playlist:    • Plamadiso Talks   The Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society: https://weizenbaum-institut.de/