CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2018
| Author | Pál, Jenő |
|---|---|
| Title | Essays on News Consumption and Dynamic Programming |
| Summary | Abstract The thesis consists of three chapters: the first, single-authored chap- ter and the second chapter, co-authored with Susan Athey and Markus Mobius, analyze online news consumption based on browsing behavior data, while the third chapter (co-authored with John Stachurski) is about a problem in numerical dynamic programming. Chapter 1 Using a linked dataset of frontpages of The New York Times observed multiple times a day and browsing data, I measure the effect of the po- sitions of news articles on the popularity of news articles. In a simple multinomial logit framework with article fixed effects I am able to iden- tify position effects from within article differences of positions across frontpages. Focusing on the vertical positioning, I estimate a negative and decreasing strength effect of article position. The magnitude of the estimated effects is large: an article positioned in the top versus the sec- ond positions all else being equal results in 26 to 44 percent higher view share for the upper position. In a counterfactual exercise, I find a con- servative mean increase of 5 percent on click-through rate resulting from solely reordering some articles on the frontpage. Furthermore, the actual ordering observed in the data is closer to a random ordering than to the counterfactual optimum. These findings point to the possibly enormous influence of editorial decisions on what people read in newspapers. Chapter 2 A policy debate centers around the question whether news aggregators such as Google News decrease or increase traffic to online news sites. One side of the debate, typically espoused by publishers, views aggre- gators as substitutes for traditional news consumption because aggre- gators’ landing pages provide snippets of news stories and therefore reduce the incentive to click on the linked articles. Defendants of ag- gregators, on the other hand, view aggregators as complements because ii 10.14754/CEU.2017.12 they make it easier to discover news and therefore drive traffic to pub- lishers. This debate has received particular attention in the European Union where two countries, Germany and Spain, enacted copyright re- forms that allow newspapers to charge aggregators for linking to news snippets. In this paper, we use Spain as a natural experiment because Google News shut down all together in response to the reform in De- cember 2014. We compare the news consumption of a large number of Google News users with a synthetic control group of similar non-Google News users. We find that the shutdown of Google News reduces over- all news consumption by about 20% for treatment users, and it reduces page views on publishers other than Google News by 10%. This de- crease is concentrated around small publishers while large publishers do not see significant changes in their overall traffic. We further find that when Google News shuts down, its users are able to replace some but not all of the types of news they previously read. Post-shutdown, they read less breaking news, hard news, and news that is not well covered on their favorite news publishers. These news categories explain most of the overall reduction in news consumption, and shed light on the mech- anisms through which aggregators interact with traditional publishers. Chapter 3 This paper studies a value function iteration algorithm based on nonex- pansive function approximation and Monte Carlo integration that can be applied to almost all stationary dynamic programming problems. The method can be represented using a randomized fitted Bellman opera- tor and a corresponding algorithm that is shown to be globally conver- gent with probability one. When additional restrictions are imposed, an OP(n−1/2) rate of convergence for Monte Carlo error is obtained. This paper has been already published (Jeno ̋ Pa ́l and John Stachurski: Fit- ted Value Function Iteration with Probability One Contractions. Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 37 (2013) 251-264). |
| Supervisor | Koren, Miklós |
| Department | Economics PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2018/pal_jeno.pdf |
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